[Techtalk] Basic connection questions

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Mon May 27 19:00:47 UTC 2013


Eeva Järvinen writes:
> > NM is one ornery piece of kit but it's (probably) the only way these days
> > if you don't feel like tackling wpa-supplicant yourself.

mgmonza at sdf.lonestar.org writes:
> <sigh> I'm afraid you're right.  When I can manage a second laptop
> or else find some absolutely reliable way to back this one up, I'll
> try either tackling wpa-supplicant or putting a different distro on
> this one.
> 
> It helps a lot to have a knowlegeable person confirm what I
> suspected: this is one of those brick walls no amount of
> head-banging is going to even dent.

I have a really hard head, so I've done a lot of that banging already.

I use Ubuntu (at least a lot of the time) and don't have network
manager installed. Uninstalling it, of course, gets rid of any
problems it introduces. :-)  I use a lightweight window manager
(Openbox) rather than a desktop like gnome, and I've found that
even if I try to use nm, it never works right for me.

Then the issue is what to use instead. wicd is one package that
works okay if you want a (more or less) supported package with GUIs
and all that. It doesn't always work for wi-fi connections, but
neither does nm or any other package I've tried -- wi-fi is just
funky that way.

But, as I said, I have a hard head so I don't use wicd either. I
like knowing what's going on under the covers, and having control
over which network I connect to. So over the years I've been
building up a pair of Python scripts that handle networking,
so under the hood I have all the wpa-supplicant commands and
suchlike, but on the commandline I just say something like
sudo netscheme home, or if I go to a new place,
netscheme -a to list all the visible accesspoints (iwlist's format
is so hard to read) and then sudo netscheme [new-ssid-at-coffee-shop]

My scripts aren't something I'm recommending as a turnkey user-level
solution. The documentation is way out of date and there are plenty
of bugs. But if you're interested in understanding what's really
going on with network setup, want to set up your network without
touchy-feely tools like network manager, or want to beat your
head against a slightly softer wall, take a look at my repo:
https://github.com/akkana/netutils

(I've also found the Python scripts handy on small embedded Linux
systems where running a desktop and GUI tools aren't an option.)

And if you actually think you might want to use something like this,
let me know and I'll update the documentation and help with anything
you're having trouble with. (Of course, patches are welcome too!)

There are a couple of other packages that do similar things. On Arch
Linux, there was something called netcfg but they just recently
switched to a similar but different setup called netctl. (Or do I
have that backward?) I haven't tried either of them on Ubuntu, and I
find my setup more transparent and a little less annoying (plus,
I get to keep beating my head against walls!), so I haven't spent
much time with them.

	...Akkana


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