NetworkManager

Revision 10 as of 2006-03-23 02:16:22

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Network Manager

Network Manager aims for Network Connectivity which "Just Works". The computer should use the wired network connection when its plugged in, but automatically switch to a wireless connection when the user unplugs it and walks away from the desk. Likewise, when the user plugs the computer back in, the computer should switch back to the wired connection. The user should, most times, not even notice that their connection has has been managed for them; they should simply see uninterrupted network connectivity.

More information about Network Manager is available [http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/ here] .

Network-Manager is beta software. You can find packages in [http://packages.ubuntu.com/breezy/net/network-manager breezy/universe]

Installation

Binary Packages

To install the packages make sure you have universe added to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu breezy universe

Install NetworkManager and it's dependencies by

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install network-manager

Compile from cvs

Get build dependencies and check out networkmanager cvs code by

sudo apt-get build-dep network-manager
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome login
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co NetworkManager
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
make
sudo make install

Note

Configuring Devices

Devices which are automatically configured on boot will not be available in NetworkManager. To allow network manager to use all of your devices remove instances of auto in /etc/network/interfaces.

Restarting dbus services

NetworkManager is lanuched as a dbus service, thats why you have to restart dbus after installing NetworkManager

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

Gnome

Go to System -> Preferences -> Sessions In the Startup Programs tab, click Add type "nm-applet", click OK. log out of your gnome session, and log back in again.

Other Window Managers/Desktop Environments

add nm-applet to your startup

Issues

If nm-applet gives this error message

WARNING **: <WARNING>   (): nmwa_dbus_init() could not acquire its service.  dbus_bus_acquire_service() says: 'Connection ":1.26" is not allowed to own the service "org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo" due to security policies in  the configuration file'

try launching nm-applet with

nm-applet --sm-disable

If it still dosen't work you'd have to edit the dbus-1 configuration files for both NetworkManager and nm-applet (this might be a security compromise, if there's another way to get nm-applet to work, please add it here).

Change the default policy context in both /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf and /etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-applet.conf so it says 'allow' instead of 'deny'.

<policy context="default">
        <allow own="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
        <allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
        <allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager"/>
</policy>

Then restart dbus

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

and launch the applet

nm-applet

Dapper

If it is not managing your network connections after upgrading to Dapper, you'll need to comment out the references to all interfaces (except lo) in /etc/network/interfaces to let NetworkManager handle them.

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.bak
sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces

It should look similar to this when you are done:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# This is a list of hotpluggable network interfaces.
# They will be activated automatically by the hotplug subsystem.
# auto eth1

# iface eth1 inet dhcp

Then reboot and you should be good to go!


CategoryDocumentation CategoryNetworking