Re: A couple of minor issues with NM

[Timothy Murphy <tim birdsnest maths tcd ie>]

On Saturday 23 December 2006 02:00, Darren Albers wrote:

> > I should say that I am using KDE rather than Gnome.
> > It seems that NetworkManager leans fairly heavily towards Gnome.
> > Maybe it is not a good choice for KDE users?
>
> Oops, I forgot that you are running KDE, I am not sure where
> knetworkmanager stores the profiles.  I think there is a mailing list
> devoted to this on kde.org or maybe a Knetworkmanager user here can
> tell you.  I vaguely remember something about the KDE wallet?

Thanks for persisting with this.
I'll see if I can find where knetworkmanager stores things,
I guess somewhere in ~/.kde/share/config/ .

> > I'm afraid I do blame the Linux WiFi developers.
> > For some reason the whole setup is in an appalling mess,
> > with files all over the place, as I said.
> > There is nothing wrong with the orinoco_cs driver;
> > once I get connected it works perfectly.
>
> This is off topic for this list but I still have no idea what this:
> "with files all over the place" means.... On my system they are in the
> location I expect them to be.

In the classic - non NM - setup
there are files called ifcfg-eth0 in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/,
in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/
and /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/

On some of my machines these are hard-linked files
(surely no-one uses hard links nowadays?)
while on others they appear to be independent,
and in fact differ from one another.

You mention files in ~/.gconf/
and I have found other relevant files in /var/run/ and other places.

> > > Have you checked your systems logs to see if it reports why the
> > > association is being stopped?
> >
> > Yes, repeatedly -
> > when it doesn't work it says the delay was too long:
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------
> > (0002) Dec 23 00:44:43 martha NetworkManager: <information>    Activation
> > (eth0) Stage 2 of 5 (Device Configure) complete.
> > Dec 23 00:44:51 martha NetworkManager: <information>    eth0: link timed
> > out. Dec 23 00:45:03 martha NetworkManager: <information>    Activation
> > (eth0/wireless): association took too long (>20s), faili
> > ng activation.
> > Dec 23 00:45:03 martha NetworkManager: <information>    Activation (eth0)
> > failure scheduled...
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > However, the next time I re-boot NM works fine,
> > completing the whole operation in less than a second.
>
> But there is nothing to indicate why the connection suddenly fails?
> What you are seeing there is it failing to associate but what causes
> it to fail initially?

As far as I can see, the response is identical whether it succeeds or fails,
up to the point where it either takes more than 20 seconds, and fails,
or takes half a second, and succeeds.
I have no idea why it sometimes goes one way, and sometimes the other.

In fact I find the complete unpredictability of NetworkManager 
very off-putting - I never know what it is going to do.

> > > > Has anyone else had problems getting NM to accept a WEP key?
> > >
> > > No, but is it a hex or ascii key?   I just tried it on my system and I
> > > was able to enter the passphrase and connect right away.
> >
> > What passphrase?
> > I don't have any such phrase - just a network key (hex)
> > which seems to work perfectly well in Windows.
> > Actually, it works perfectly well in the usual WiFi setup in Linux,
> > when entered as key=... in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 .
>
> Are you adding the 0x in front of the key?   I have also heard of some
> people having problems when their AP is set to shared instead of open.

I didn't prefix the number with 0x,
but I'm pretty sure it doesn't require that,
as it checks that one has given 10 characters,
before allowing one to try to connect.
Also I said I was giving a hex key.

What exactly is the different between "shared" and "open"?
I just have a key set on my access point,
and I give that key on each machine accessing the AP.
Is that shared or open?

Actually, I tried replying both "shared" and "open",
but I didn't see any difference in the response.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland