Plasma NM Network Manager (work being carried out)

[menotu]

http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/2011/10/solid-sprint-day-3.html

Main Window



The "Enable Networking" check box and "Show More" button are now in the system tray's right click menu. "Show More" has also been renamed to "Show unsaved networks":



And now the new (unfinished) details window:

[muungwana]

its nice to see suggestions of anonymous people get attention sometimes.

I showed screenshots of plasma network manager here a while ago, then somebody made a comment about it being too wide and taking too much space. I opened a bug report mentioning it and now they are reworking the UI. This forum should get a fraction of the credit for the new UI 

[menotu]

Plasma NM: first release

http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/2011/10/plasma-nm-first-release.html

Yes, that is right, we have the first release of Plasma NM and from now on there is going to be regular Plasma NM releases.

During Solid Sprint I accepted the job of being KDE's Network Management maintainer. I would like to thank Alex Fiestas and Will Stephenson (former maintainer) for trusting me for this job...............

..................


This release is basically what is in nm09 branch as of October 01 and does not contain the usability changes I have blogged about. I plan to release 0.9.0 final with most complete translations as possible. The usability changes will probably go to 0.9.1 along with libnm-qt port.

[menotu]

By lamarque - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 ( lamarque-lvs.blogspot)

NetworkManager: per device routing tables

Today Alex Fiestas told me about one problem he has and that I had long ago.

Everybody uses Internet nowadays and and probably most of you know what IP address, netmask, gateway address mean. For example, my notebook is using this configuration right now:

eth0
IP address: 192.168.1.10
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1

wlan0
IP address: 192.168.1.12
Netmask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.1.1

Yes, two devices in the same local network, but that does not invalidate this post :-)

Although I have the same IP as gateway for my two devices the kernel sees 192.168.1.1/eth0 and 192.168.1.1/wlan0, not 192.168.1.1. When there is only one active device there is no problem, but what happens if you have two, like my notebook?

Only one of those two IP address/device pairs is the default route, that is, the IP address/device pair the kernel resorts to when it cannot find the computer to connect to. Now enters NetworkManager. NetworkManager sorts devices by type when deciding which one to configure as default route. If I am not mistaken it sorts like this: wired, wifi, mobile broadband.

Now the problem:

see herel

[menotu]

By lamarque - 5 February 2012 ( lamarque-lvs.blogspot)

DSL connections in Plasma NM

One of the things I would like to have working well in Plasma NM is DSL support. Unfortunatelly, I do not have easy access to any DSL provider so I cannot test the current support for DSL in Plasma NM. I do not even know if the support really works. I asked if it works in the bug entry about DSL support and only one person has answered saying it works so I assumed it does work.

Last week I was surffing the web and stumbled accross this post in a Brazilian forum (it is Brazilian Portuguese) explaining how to set up a DSL connection in Plasma NM. Basically Plasma NM really works with DSL, which is great, but there is a catch: you need to disable the auto-connect option for the wired connection that uses the same device that the DSL connection uses. Explaining: DSL works over ethernet (more common), wifi, and maybe over other devices. When the device (ethernet) is meant to be used with DSL you must disable the auto-connect feature in the wired connection associated to that device. First create a system DSL connection:



In the Ethernet tab restrict the connection to a specific ethernet device. If you have more than one ethernet device do not be afraid, the "eth0" below is just an user-friendly way to select the device, what Plasma NM really uses is the device's MAC address. If for example you have eth0 and eth1 in your system, then you restrict to eth0 but for some reason the system swaps eth0 for eth1, Plasma NM is smart enough to see that and it will automatically change the configuration to eth1.



Save the configuration by clicking on the Ok button and go to the Wired tab in Plasma NM's kcm (k control module):



Click on "Edit", the edit dialog will appear. Go to the connections's "Ethernet" tab and disable "Connect automatically" and check "System connection" to allow the system (NetworkManager) to use the connection without you need to open a KDE session first:



Save the configuration by clickling on the Ok button and try to connect. You can check if it is connected in Interface Details for the wired connection (I got this screenshot from the forum, that is why it is in Brazilian Portuguese):



Notice the "Nome do sistema" field (System name) showing "ppp0", that means the connection is really active.

For some reason nm-applet does not require changing the wired connection configuration, which sounds reasonable. But without a connection to test it will take me time to figure out how to make that work. Until then DSL users can use the configuration above.

http://lamarque-lvs.blogspot.com/