Re: Skipping popup requesting secrets

[Drew Moseley <dmoseley mvista com>]

Dan Williams wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 12:11 -0700, Drew Moseley wrote:
>> What is the best way to have NetworkManager/nm-applet __not__ request wireless secrets?  We have a scenario where we are attempting to connect to the network and we do not have a user at the system.  In this scenario we just want to fail this particular connection without marking the connection as bad.  We want to attempt another connection with the same secrets later, ala background polling.
> 
> You use system connections instead of user connections.  System
> connections are "trusted" (ie, they should be readable only by root so
> secrets are not leaked) and thus the secrets are always available to
> NetworkManager.  The system settings service has a "keyfile" plugin that
> you can enable that knows how to read/write all NM connection types.
> Most of the distro-specific plugins that scrape the distro file formats
> don't yet write those back out, so you wouldn't be able to easily
> update/add them via D-Bus.

Hmm.  I'm not sure I explained myself clearly.  What I am trying to accomplish is avoiding the popup requesting secrets when, for some reason, the connection attempt fails.  Under ordinary circumstances we have no problems.  Network Manager is able to read secrets and connect just fine.  Occasionally however, for some reason (low signal strength; access point down; who knows) NM decides it needs to get a new set of secrets from the user.  We are doing a periodic background network operation and there is no visible UI at the time so we want to just give up and assume the network is down.  The current behavior pops up the request window and then the applet is blocked so we are never able to connect until the user dismisses the box.

I'm looking at generating a patch but I was wondering if it was possible to do something like this without modifying the source.

Clear?


Thanks,
Drew