Category: NetworkManager

Pedal to the metal on the way to NetworkManager 0.7.

Connection Editor

Tambet and I have landed the last real bits of Add/Edit and gotten the pages pretty much finished. The applet and the connection editor retrieve and fill in your passwords too.

Contribute Back to the Community (or, Unmanaged Devices)

A few weeks back, I added an unmanaged devices interface to the system settings service. With 0.6.x, the most often asked question is “I’m an Ubuntu user; why can NM find my network device?”. This was for two reasons: (1) because Ubuntu ships a bunch of shady out-of-kernel wireless drivers (at76, prism2_usb, acx, madwifi, ndiswrapper) that often just don’t implement WEXT correctly and therefore won’t work well with wpa_supplicant, and therefore won’t work with NetworkManager, and (2) Ubuntu patched NetworkManager so that most devices in /etc/network/interfaces are ignored by NM, instead of helping to fix up the Debian backend to proxy that configuration so NM could have a chance to manage the device. So when anything goes wrong, the user is encouraged to configure the device in “Manual” mode instead, and it disappears from NetworkManager.

With 0.7, the system settings plugin for your distro will recognize these devices, tell NetworkManager they aren’t supposed to be managed, and the applet will make you aware of the horror of what you’ve just done 🙂

(as an aside, distros need to help push drivers and patches upstream, not stuff random bits into the kernel and hope everything is kittens and roses and puppy dogs tails and bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens)

Network Before Login

So this time around, distros can write much more capable plugins to proxy their native config files to NetworkManager connections, and they will just show up in the menu. It also makes the connections available at boot. Static IPs, custom DNS servers, and whatever other crack you’d like to inflict on your network adapter. Both Fedora and SUSE have plugins, and Tambet just wrote a GKeyFile plugin that stores connections in a legacy-free/crack-free format too.

Other Hotness:

• Users are notified of VPN failures and what might have gone wrong
• Static WEP keys on indexes other than 1
• PPPoE
• Wired 802.1x
• Your Mom

Next up: making the serial driver code more robust, fix bugs, fix up ad-hoc Wifi, and fix more bugs. But 0.7 is already cooking MCs like a pound of bacon.

Yeah, I’m talking to you happy, carefree, wireless-using, Nordic-looking prettygirl, with your Sprint Novatel S720 all up in our face.

I spent an hour or so hacking in CDMA card support on top of Tambet Ingo’s awesome 3G mobile broadband and PPP bits. And it just works. And like the GSM cards that Tambet’s got working, your VPN works over it too. Like magic. Tambet is the man.

What we do need to do, though, is standardize a method in HAL for tagging CDMA and GSM cards as “modems” (along with other things that are modems and accept AT commands). We also need to tag cards as CDMA or GSM. David Zeuthen had a few ideas on this, but I think in the end it’s going to have to be with .fdi files, because vendors just don’t follow the spec. There are separate USB protocol numbers allocated for CDMA and GSM devices, but no card I’ve been able to find uses them. And that won’t work for PCMCIA-based devices like the Sierra Wireless AirCard 860. When will hardware manufacturers learn? (hint: likely never).

The CDMA support won’t go into trunk until Tambet’s added yet more hotness, like signal strength detection and pulling out the currently connected network and showing that to the user. I’ve proved, though, that it’s trivial to add the CDMA bits when the GSM support is further along.

Rejoice, and be merry, for the wireless future is almost here.