Network Manager does not find system wide connections

[Hadmut Danisch <hadmut danisch de>]

Hi,

maybe someone can give me a hint about where to start debugging:

I am using Ubuntu 9.04 on several machines. On some machines Network
Manager works as expected when making connections system wide available
with the connection editor: It puts a file into
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections. When starting
nm-connection-editor, they appear as connections, and they can be used
as normal.

But then on two of my machines this does not work. When setting
connections to system wide availability, it puts a file into
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections as well, but then does not find
it again, as if the file would not exist. Network connections are not
configured, and nm-connection-editor does not find it (i.e. does not
display the connection).

I wrote a little tool to fetch connections from dbus. It works on those
machines where nm works, but it returns an emtpy list of connections on
those machines where it doesn't.

debugging with strace showed that nm-system-connections does not look at
all into /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections at all. Reading the
source code is almost pointless, highly complex without any comments,
source code of the quality 'virtually unreadable'.

I still could not figure out what makes the difference between those
machines where it works and those where it doesn't.

Any idea or hint?

regards
Hadmut