KNetworkManager4 is driving me nuts

[Nicholas Betcher]

2009/12/2 Rolf Eike Beer <kde at opensource.sf-tec.de>
>
> Yesterday I found Will's blog posting [1], tested it and: yeah, for the
> first
> time ever I was able to connect to my WLAN using KNetworkManager4. Today it
> connected again. I then scanned a bit through the config options and used
> "limit connection to wlan0" and from this moment on my connection was gone
> again. Reverting that option, restarting network, KNetworkManager, rfkill
> on/off, nothing changed anything.
>

It seems that limiting the connection to a specific interface does not work
very well in my experience either.


> My Network is still listed in the context menu of the systray icon (name,
> signal strength, encryption sign) but it's not "active" anymore. Clicking
> on
> it doesn't change anything, right clicking on it has every action (copy IP
> address, properties) deactivated. When I now do "network restart" I'll get
> three notifications (network down, network up, wlan0 connected) and I see
> the
> systray icon change to the general icon and back. After that context menu
> is
> still deactivated.
>

I agree that the verbosity could be numerous times better. Even just a
little progress bar embedded in one of the widgets, a notification saying
that there was a problem (and preferably stating what it was), or displaying
a log of the NetworkManager error. This is something I may consider getting
my hands dirty with in *trunk*.


> Then I changed everything one more time, again restarted the network and it
> connected again. Now at least "copy IP address" from the context menu of
> the
> connection is active but "Properties" is still not. Ok, test again: limit
> connection to WLAN0: everything broken again. Revert that: nothing changes.
> Restart network: works again.
>

For me issuing 'rcnetwork restart' fixes nearly every problem with
KNetworkManager so that tells me there is some kind of communication *
breakdown with NetworkManager. Fixing this problem is well outside of my
league.*


> Ok, this seems to be at least 4 different problems:
>
> -limiting a network to a connection (even the correct one) renders it
> unusable
>

Also, it's hard to determine which network card is which (in the list) if
you have more than one wireless card. This is especially problematic when
you limit a connection to a particular interface because the network shows
in the list twice (once for each network card), but you're not able to
decipher which network in the list will use a particular card. The only time
limiting a connection to a particular interface makes sense (in current *
trunk*) is if "Automatically connect" is checked for that network.


> -connections can sometimes be correctly shown even when the network is not
> connected and you have no way of connecting them without restarting the
> whole
> networkmanager (requires sudo or root permissions)
>

On this note, but mostly off-topic, KNetworkManager does not handle missing
firmware very well. I know this is probably a technical limitation to
NetworkManager, but openSUSE does not install the firmware until the first
time you run the Software Management. If you skip the 'Online Update' step
in the install the firmware will be missing. Also, other distributions may
not handle missing firmware as graciously as openSUSE, so it's something
that will need to be "handled."


> -when networkmanager is restarted and no connection to connect to can be
> found
> (e.g. first bug) the entire context menu of the systray icon stays
> deactivated
>

That's an old bug - it handles NetworkManager restarts better now.


> But what really is missing is a way to get any logging or report what is
> wrong when something is
> not working.
>

Amen... this needs to be present (or even the option to turn it on) whether
the program was built with a debug flag or not.


Sincerely,
Nick Betcher, CPhT
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