Re: Nm applet in gdm3

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu tl gmail com>]

On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 9:50 AM, Pavel Simerda <psimerda redhat com> wrote:
[...]
>> I wont to be able to logon on my Laptops via ldap over Openvpn and
>> Wifi. To make a connection to my vpn, and also from an new wifi, I
>> must be able to configure and establish networking connections
>> before login.
>
> You should be logged in for configuration, at least on the command-line.
>

Some people depend on LDAP to login or even a VPN to be able to reach
an LDAP server. All of this depends on network connectivity, which may
or may not be different between locations.

You could have one wired connection with DHCP and one with static for example.

While it's true that if wireless connections are preconfigured, things
should work mostly well, it's still necessary to activate VPN
connections manually. I'm guessing this is the case here.

Where you need a VPN to reach the LDAP server that will auth you (I
guess there should be some caching to not need this, but whatever),
you'll want to enable the VPN connection from within the "greeter",
gdm or otherwise.

[...]

>> So I need the nm-applet icon in gdm to be able to choose
>> system wide network connections (or create new in new wifis)
>
> Does that mean anyone who comes to the computer should be allowed to
> do the administration?

I'd recommend against allowing the creation of new wifi networks
directly from the greeter without requiring admin auth (using a
policykit dialog for example), but I can totally understand a case
where you're in another city, want to check your email from your hotel
room but first need to create the connection.

>> and connect to my vpn before log in as specific user against ldap (over
>> the vpn connection).
>>
>> I'd try to start the nm-applet via copying the .desktop file to the
>> gdm autostart directory as shown on several tutorials but it don't
>> work.

This used to work, but if you're using GDM3 (at this point, I don't
know) something could have changed in how the gdm session is started
that makes some pieces required by nm-applet unavailable.

>> I am using arch linux 64bit with gnome 3.4 (updated) on all machines.
>>
>> Does anyone has a idea what to do?

I don't think you have a choice here but to start debugging things --
start NetworkManager in debug mode, see what it says for the gdm
session. Start nm-applet from the gdm session and check
~/.xsession-errors for hints, and look at the nm-applet code.

We spent a good amount of time making this work on Ubuntu with
lightdm, but it needed a new policykit policy for the lightdm user,
and some environment variables set by lightdm to establish a way for
nm-applet to know it has to handle things slightly differently. I'll
post patches here (those that can be upstreamed) shortly.


Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu tl gmail com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu tl gmail com
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