Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 22, 2010 21:07 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News) by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

And if your machine isn't a laptop or mobile device, run screaming from NetworkManager and all its ilk. I've resorted to pinning the damn thing at priority -1 on every one of my machines (or analogues on non-Debian-derived distros) because otherwise it gets pulled in by upgrades and then on the next boot my network doesn't work because NetworkManager has jumped in and blown away my static routes and customized MTUs and traffic shaping and everything else it could get its mucky little hands on.

IMNSHO it should be something that is installed by default only on laptop-like spins of distros, and is otherwise kept well out of the way. It's downright toxic to system stability on desktops and servers.

Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 22, 2010 21:17 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

hear hear.

even on my laptop I kill it off (with the exception that while I am on the road I may turn it on for a bit)

on my thinkpad it's too eager to decide something is wrong with the wireless card and quit working, while it works just fine if I hard-code the parameters into /etc/network/interfaces.

even with my wired network, both networkmanager and wicd turn a 'network cable was unplugged for a few seconds' into 'shutdown the network, for the user to do a manual disconnect/reconnect before anything will work again' situation.

Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 23, 2010 11:29 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (2 responses)

Why would you foist crap like networkmanager on laptop users? If it's junk (and it is) then it's junk. I use wpa_supplicant directly on my laptop and have no problems with it. If you splashed a decent UI on top of that then you'd have wireless issues taken care of.

Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 17:28 UTC (Thu) by Epicanis (guest, #62805) [Link] (1 responses)

"If you splashed a decent UI on top of [wpa_supplicant] then you'd have wireless issues taken care of."

I've been happily using WICD for my network handling. It feels like a simpler, "cleaner" solution and has worked great for me for the last couple of years. Plus, if I want my computer to remain connected to the network when I log off, now it does...

It seems to operate great with KDE, too.

Dirk Hohndel at Akademy (KDE.News)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 7:57 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

yes but it doesn't support a lot of things, like 3G, modems and stuff.

I hate NM but there isn't really a much better solution (for now). And there now is a NM commandline control thing, if only it kept the network up when there was a Xorg crash...