Announcing ConnMan.net [LWN.net]

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 0:09 UTC (Wed) by landman (guest, #2901)
In reply to: Announcing ConnMan.net by Cyberax
Parent article: Announcing ConnMan.net

NetworkManager is non-usable on most of the machines we deal with. One of the very first actions I do after installing a system is to replace NetworkManager with wicd. The latter works, in expected ways, with no surprises. The former? Not so much. On laptops with WPA2 PSK, we get exactly one connection to the Wifi. Second connection never works, even if you re-enter the key.

I no longer even waste my time with it. Wicd gets installed immediately after OS load for portable machines that have to connect via wireless/wired interfaces.

Not sure if ConnMan will be better or worse than NetworkManager. Don't care. Wicd works. Very well.

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Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 2:31 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (7 responses)

I know it's fashionable to post these rants about how some random piece of popular desktop software is a piece of junk, but seriously... what does one niggly (but I'm sure very frustrating) NetworkManager bug have to do with ConnMan.net? More generally, how does this kind of post make LWN a more wonderful place?

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 5:59 UTC (Wed) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link] (3 responses)

The grandparent post was on-topic and quite useful - I have the same experience with Network Manager and end up using wicd as well, and I've seen quite a lot of discussion of this. wicd is also more appropriate for low-end machines with less than 200 MB RAM.

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 16:54 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The one time I tried wicd it made my eyes bleed. I don't know how somebody could possibly recommend it over network-manager except on very low resource machines.. and even then I think that just using the default Debian network configuration scripts would be superior.

I think that most people are basing their impressions on Network-Manager 0.6 stuff, which was abismal. The 0.7.1 is vastly superior in all respects.

I have yet to run into any way other then Network-Manager to make using a tethered phone, 3G network adapter, or anything of that nature even remotely usable in Linux*.

I wouldn't mind seeing a better more modular solution then NM. If somebody had a very nice command line client for NM then that would be terrific. Maybe Conman will be better since it seems to be designed for small devices like Cell phones and whatnot.

But so far nothing I've seen comes close to trying to fix the problems NM is trying to fix.

* and if any solution anybody is using involves ppp your solution sucks.. modern devices don't work like that anymore and if they can be configured through ppp and chat scripts then that means that it's in 'legacy' mode and performance and reliability will suffer.

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 25, 2009 9:34 UTC (Thu) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link] (1 responses)

You are aware that wicd is implemented in python?
How does that make it more appropriate for low-end machines?
/me being puzzled

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 25, 2009 17:53 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

Because basically no one does any actual measurement, they just believe and repeat what's been written by some guy on some website (often without instructions to reproduce).

Or they equate say a list of library dependencies with memory use, when in the real world it's very likely user interface strings, images, or plain old memory leaks that are actually using memory.

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 6:44 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

remember that this was in response to the initial 'Network Manager exists and does everything you would need, why would anyone bother to duplicate this work' post.

it's one more comment to show that Network Manager doesn't work for everyone, so there definantly is room for alternate implementations of the same basic idea

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 9:27 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

> it's one more comment to show that Network Manager doesn't work for everyone, so there definantly is room for alternate implementations of the same basic idea

But the conclusion doesn't follow. Unpacking, the argument seems to be: "Even after huge amounts of testing and debugging by all major distros, NetworkManager is not 100% bug-free in all configurations. Therefore, we should throw out all the code and experience that went into making it what the original poster calls 'fairly acceptable', and start over from scratch."

Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly happy for people to play around with different approaches to solving this problem, there are good arguments for doing so, I'm glad wicd works for people, whatever. And I probably should have followed my first impulse and ignored that post as a bit of regrettable but inevitable noise. But I keep seeing these posts that are basically just HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT THIS SOFTWARE HAS BUGS without anything to tickle the reader's intellect, and what's the point?

(Not that this post has a leg to stand on there!)

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 25, 2009 11:21 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> Unpacking, the argument seems to be: "Even after huge amounts of testing and debugging by all major distros, NetworkManager is not 100% bug-free in all configurations. Therefore, we should throw out all the code and experience that went into making it what the original poster calls 'fairly acceptable', and start over from scratch."

I unpacked something slightly different, making much more sense. But of course perception is subjective.

"After huge amounts of testing and code review, NetworkManager has too many bugs and design limitations and these are too hard to fix. So let us start from scratch, after of course learning from its mistakes".

I am not saying this is true, but it does make sense.

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 24, 2009 16:35 UTC (Wed) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]

So is your driver bouncing around and unable to hold a stable connection? Is the access point and network randomly failing to reassociate? What driver do you have? Can you provide some logs from /var/log/messages or /var/log/daemon.log that show the problem so we can diagnose it?

The "second time problem" is almost always a case of driver bugs or supplicant bugs. If you can connect again after you 'killall -TERM wpa_supplicant' or 'rmmod <your driver>', then you've found the source of your problem, and that's where it should be fixed.

Announcing ConnMan.net

Posted Jun 25, 2009 16:05 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

when was the last time you tried NM, maybe your bug is fixed. have you reported the issue to the devs?