[Techtalk] Basic connection questions

[Akkana Peck]

Maria McKinley writes:
> When NM first came out, I had some luck with uninstalling it and using
> /etc/network/interfaces, but lately this hasn't worked, except on netbooted
> machines. I'm not sure why exactly, but seems the powers that be really
> want you to use NM. :/ 

I've seen this too. On the last few Ubuntus (starting around Oneiric
maybe?), /etc/network/interfaces started being really flaky, and you
can't run service networking restart and expect it to do anything at
all. But sometimes it does work. I haven't figured out why it works
sometimes and not other times.

FWIW, on Ubuntu Pangolin, I added this line to /etc/rc.local:

sh /etc/init.d/networking stop; sh /etc/init.d/networking start

and that succeeded in starting whatever the current network was
in /etc/network/interfaces at boot time ... along with a warning
about "service" being the right way to do this now, but I found
"service networking start" didn't work as reliably.

/etc/init.d/networking stop/start doesn't always work on Ubuntu
to change networks after one has already been started, but it does
seem to work pretty reliably to start the network at boot time.
Why it didn't happen automatically and I had to add it to rc.local,
though, is a mystery I never solved. There's no support in the
Ubuntu community for this sort of thing; as Maria says, they really
want you to use NM.

	...Akkana