Re: Working/Non-working network adapters

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-09-25 at 18:43 -0500, Steev Klimaszewski wrote:
> Has anyone sat down and created a "database" of what all networking
> adapters work or don't work with NetworkManager?  I saw on the site that
> some cards don't work, and some do, so I was wondering if someone had a
> bit more extensive list.

Not to my knowledge, but there are lists out there for Linux in general.
Unfortunately, this would be a bit hard because you have to track which
versions of drivers are in which distributions and which kernels support
features.  But there is enough to say that "given kernel >= 2.6.10,
Belkin F5D6020 most likely works" for example.

> In the same vein, is there a way to tell NetworkManager to ignore
> certain devices, or is something like that planned.  For example, a way
> to filter out based on the MAC address of the adapter to never attempt
> to use it.

Not really, that wasn't viewed as critical at this time.  The attitude
was generally that "if you know its not going to work, why are you
plugging it in..."  I'm open to being convinced otherwise though.

> I bring this up because recently, NetworkManager has started to segfault
> on me, with some adapters and not others, so I would like to figure out
> what all are the working vs. non-working adapters, and see if there
> isn't a way around them.  I typically keep 2 wireless cards in my pcmcia

This is most likely due to the kernel/NM/iwlib Wireless Extensions
mismatch, if you're using Fedora Core...

> slots, sometimes I have one monitoring my network to make sure nothing
> funky is going on with it, while the other is connected so I have
> internet access.  However when you start NetworkManager, it disagrees
> and turns both cards into looking for a network.  Perhaps I am missing
> something though.

No, this is the defined behavior so far.  It's not really meant for some
of the more unusual cases like this though.  I'm not opposed to adding
some code to ignore certain MAC addresses, but I would be opposed to
putting that UI in the applet.  We're trying to take stuff out of the
applet.  A small utility that reads settings from GConf or elsewhere
would probably work.

Note that we don't have an OS-level config system for NetworkManager at
this time, since network connections are viewed quite correctly as a
per-user thing.  If you're running a server on your machine that you
need 24/7, don't use NM right now.  However, NM needs to play well in
this use-case in the future.

The best place for this right now would be the system distro-specific
config scripts most likely.  If they already have an "ignore me" setting
then we can import that into the system backends and start ignoring
those cards.

Dan