6 ms·

I stopped using NetworkManager years ago, I just use wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd directly (well I use the systemd services for these so they're started automatica

by ploxiln 12y ago

I stopped using NetworkManager years ago, I just use wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd directly (well I use the systemd services for these so they're started automatically). I also always name the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks differently, and connect explicitly to the one I want. Yes it would be great if NetworkManager did the right things automatically, but the task might be impossible due to hardware and driver quirks. WiFi chips are among the buggiest chips in computers today. Really, the chip. I've seen ridiculous workaround in drivers for multiple vendors' chips. Also, the drivers are complicated and buggy. And the linux drivers don't get quite enough full-time attention from the chip vendor to work solidly. Those windows and mac wifi driver teams are pretty big.

raverbashing 12y ago
Yeah, NM rarely works correctly "Ah why don't you open a bug", because people are not interested in making it work (like a lot of "modern" Linux stuff) If it works manually (dhcp, wpa_supplicant, etc), I don't see what's the problem. Or better, I see: NM doesn't work. Yeah, unfortunately you're right about WiFi chips. It's about making the bare minimum hardware and shoving everything onto the drivers.
- nodata 12y ago
  NM tries to be too clever. I have no idea what some of the options in the interface mean.
fragmede 12y ago
If you haven't used Network Manager in years, I'd suggest taking another look. It (like PulseAudio) was shipped far too early, souring early-adopters on its use. Later kernels have (somewhat) cleaned up the wireless driver interface so these days I don't have problems with day-to-day usage of Network Manager.
- antocv 12y ago
  PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound over network - something it promised to do well, but oh doesnt.
  - clarry 12y ago
    If you aren't blessed with luck, one might say that PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound. Over and over again. Every time you think it's fixed for good, it'll prove you wrong.
    - fragmede 12y ago
      On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!
      - secstate 12y ago
        Sure, sound works fine for a bit, but wait until you want to plug a USB headset in. First time, great. Second time, fail. Log out, log back in, headset works again. Lame!
      - serf 12y ago
        It's all about having a common hardware profile. Add any external sound hardware, use a optical or SPDIF port instead, add some speakers. It'll break sooner-or-later, and in my own experiences it tends to be whenever my personal computer gets away from the 'typical' desktop profile.
      - antocv 12y ago
        Try to plug in headset and have the sound out of it, plug it out and have the sound on the laptop speakers, without going all hacker on it, or for example just try to use your bluetooth headset. Yeah. Nope.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      My current regular experience is: Pulse audio + reconnecting bluetooth speaker after it powers off = bad day
frik 12y ago
I use wpa_supplicant on Raspberry Pi. It works fine even with bad WiFi signal, though I have trouble with Samba client. It forgets to reconnect to SMB server every few weeks after dozens of WiFi reconnects. Tracking down the issue and filing a bug is a bit complicated (automated embedded device, WiFi signal noise, etc).
- nodata 12y ago
  Your voltage on the USB port might be too low.
hypercube 12y ago
I always had troubles with the managers too, and now use wpa_supplicant directly combined with systemd-networkd. When a connection is established networkd automatically starts dhcp. I think it connects faster, and I've had no problems with wifi since I switched.
antocv 12y ago
Same here, I kind of never got NetworkManager to do any good, I just gave up, so mii-tool, dhcpcd, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant are well used tools, basically it works fine, when I actually have the drivers. These tools dont bail out on me or try to hide complexities behind more complex abstractions like NetworkManager does. If im going to be troubleshooting anything, its going to be the networking issue and not dbus to networkmanager interface or policy files.
- clarry 12y ago
  So basically you need four different tools to set up networking? Well, it sure sounds like the complexities are there and in plain sight then. I can't help but wonder though if it isn't possible to get rid of some of these complexities and make life simpler?
  - antocv 12y ago
    I dont know, possibly, I see now that mii-tool is packaged together with ip. So really, it depends, it is different layers - different tools , but could still package all together into one package and have one syntax for all. wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd should go under the net-tools/ip package too. ip link should also show the information of link-speed from mii-tool, ip addr should take an dhcp argument instead of requiring a separate dhcpcd. Then merge wpa_supplicant into ip, perhaps make a ip-wlink which requires some SSID/keyphrase to set it to "up" state. So wpa_supplicant dhcpcd iwconfig/iwlist/scan-tools should be merged to net-tools and have same syntax as the rest of the net-tools package. But yeah, even then you need to learn the layers and set them up. In my opinion Windows got it wrong, its user interface is horrible and people often complain about networking problems which are really UI problems or bugs in Windows/drivers there too. This problem is classic - networking is a stack and thats a fact, and the best tools/UI is one which allows you to dig through that stack layer by layer. On windows its all or nothing.
  - taylorbuley 12y ago
    It's not as complicated as it sounds in practice and can take the form of a simple config block in /etc/network/interfaces iface wlan0 inet dhcp wireless-essi DE:C0:D1:F1:ED wireless-mode managed wpa-ssid "Your SSID" wpa-psk "YourPassword123"
javert 12y ago
Contrary to what other commenters are saying, I've been using NetworkManager on my ArchLinux Thinkpads for years and it works great. (And I don't even have a desktop environment, I have DWM, so I am usually a "do it yourself" person.) Whereas I could never get all the mess working to get things working well without NetworkManager. My experience is, spend hours messing with configuration shit or just let NetworkManager do all that automatically for you, which in my case, it does well.
- nextos 12y ago
  I'm also a DIY person. Using networkd already along with systemd and wpa_supplicant. It's very simple and reliable.
- keeperofdakeys 12y ago
  Network Manager uses wpa_supplicant underneath, and delegates roaming and AP selection to it. So I don't know how what should be a dump program on top gets such a bad wrap. Not that I don't use wpa_supplicant directly anyway, but when I have used NM, it seems to do the same job.
a-nikolaev 12y ago
I had been using wicd on my old laptop for a few years. Then, when configuring a new computer, wicd failed to work on it. I tried, probably, everything, even the most low level CLI tools, but still connection kept failing, and frustratingly, it was providing almost no information about what was going wrong.. Then, I installed XFCE to had some temporary GUI, and its NM connected to WiFi. Now, I'm using NM, and still have no idea, why other tools did not work for me.
- pyre 12y ago
  Years ago, I had issues with several hotel wifis on the east coast. I found that completely disabling NetworkManager and manually connecting was the only work-around. But NetworkManager had to be disabled from startup. If it was started at any point, even if the service was stopped (and a manual connection was attempted) I couldn't connect to the network. It's hit-or-miss.

by ploxiln 12y ago

raverbashing 12y ago

Yeah, NM rarely works correctly "Ah why don't you open a bug", because people are not interested in making it work (like a lot of "modern" Linux stuff) If it works manually (dhcp, wpa_supplicant, etc), I don't see what's the problem. Or better, I see: NM doesn't work. Yeah, unfortunately you're right about WiFi chips. It's about making the bare minimum hardware and shoving everything onto the drivers.

nodata 12y ago
NM tries to be too clever. I have no idea what some of the options in the interface mean.

fragmede 12y ago

If you haven't used Network Manager in years, I'd suggest taking another look. It (like PulseAudio) was shipped far too early, souring early-adopters on its use. Later kernels have (somewhat) cleaned up the wireless driver interface so these days I don't have problems with day-to-day usage of Network Manager.

antocv 12y ago
PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound over network - something it promised to do well, but oh doesnt.
- clarry 12y ago
  If you aren't blessed with luck, one might say that PulseAudio still requires you to be a hacker to get sound. Over and over again. Every time you think it's fixed for good, it'll prove you wrong.
  - fragmede 12y ago
    On the large majority of laptops I've installed Ubuntu on recently, sound has just worked out of the box, so here's to hoping my lucky streak continues!
    - secstate 12y ago
      Sure, sound works fine for a bit, but wait until you want to plug a USB headset in. First time, great. Second time, fail. Log out, log back in, headset works again. Lame!
    - serf 12y ago
      It's all about having a common hardware profile. Add any external sound hardware, use a optical or SPDIF port instead, add some speakers. It'll break sooner-or-later, and in my own experiences it tends to be whenever my personal computer gets away from the 'typical' desktop profile.
    - antocv 12y ago
      Try to plug in headset and have the sound out of it, plug it out and have the sound on the laptop speakers, without going all hacker on it, or for example just try to use your bluetooth headset. Yeah. Nope.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    My current regular experience is: Pulse audio + reconnecting bluetooth speaker after it powers off = bad day

frik 12y ago

I use wpa_supplicant on Raspberry Pi. It works fine even with bad WiFi signal, though I have trouble with Samba client. It forgets to reconnect to SMB server every few weeks after dozens of WiFi reconnects. Tracking down the issue and filing a bug is a bit complicated (automated embedded device, WiFi signal noise, etc).

nodata 12y ago
Your voltage on the USB port might be too low.

hypercube 12y ago

I always had troubles with the managers too, and now use wpa_supplicant directly combined with systemd-networkd. When a connection is established networkd automatically starts dhcp. I think it connects faster, and I've had no problems with wifi since I switched.

antocv 12y ago

Same here, I kind of never got NetworkManager to do any good, I just gave up, so mii-tool, dhcpcd, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant are well used tools, basically it works fine, when I actually have the drivers. These tools dont bail out on me or try to hide complexities behind more complex abstractions like NetworkManager does. If im going to be troubleshooting anything, its going to be the networking issue and not dbus to networkmanager interface or policy files.

clarry 12y ago
So basically you need four different tools to set up networking? Well, it sure sounds like the complexities are there and in plain sight then. I can't help but wonder though if it isn't possible to get rid of some of these complexities and make life simpler?
- antocv 12y ago
  I dont know, possibly, I see now that mii-tool is packaged together with ip. So really, it depends, it is different layers - different tools , but could still package all together into one package and have one syntax for all. wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd should go under the net-tools/ip package too. ip link should also show the information of link-speed from mii-tool, ip addr should take an dhcp argument instead of requiring a separate dhcpcd. Then merge wpa_supplicant into ip, perhaps make a ip-wlink which requires some SSID/keyphrase to set it to "up" state. So wpa_supplicant dhcpcd iwconfig/iwlist/scan-tools should be merged to net-tools and have same syntax as the rest of the net-tools package. But yeah, even then you need to learn the layers and set them up. In my opinion Windows got it wrong, its user interface is horrible and people often complain about networking problems which are really UI problems or bugs in Windows/drivers there too. This problem is classic - networking is a stack and thats a fact, and the best tools/UI is one which allows you to dig through that stack layer by layer. On windows its all or nothing.
- taylorbuley 12y ago
  It's not as complicated as it sounds in practice and can take the form of a simple config block in /etc/network/interfaces iface wlan0 inet dhcp wireless-essi DE:C0:D1:F1:ED wireless-mode managed wpa-ssid "Your SSID" wpa-psk "YourPassword123"

javert 12y ago

Contrary to what other commenters are saying, I've been using NetworkManager on my ArchLinux Thinkpads for years and it works great. (And I don't even have a desktop environment, I have DWM, so I am usually a "do it yourself" person.) Whereas I could never get all the mess working to get things working well without NetworkManager. My experience is, spend hours messing with configuration shit or just let NetworkManager do all that automatically for you, which in my case, it does well.

nextos 12y ago
I'm also a DIY person. Using networkd already along with systemd and wpa_supplicant. It's very simple and reliable.
keeperofdakeys 12y ago
Network Manager uses wpa_supplicant underneath, and delegates roaming and AP selection to it. So I don't know how what should be a dump program on top gets such a bad wrap. Not that I don't use wpa_supplicant directly anyway, but when I have used NM, it seems to do the same job.

a-nikolaev 12y ago

I had been using wicd on my old laptop for a few years. Then, when configuring a new computer, wicd failed to work on it. I tried, probably, everything, even the most low level CLI tools, but still connection kept failing, and frustratingly, it was providing almost no information about what was going wrong.. Then, I installed XFCE to had some temporary GUI, and its NM connected to WiFi. Now, I'm using NM, and still have no idea, why other tools did not work for me.

pyre 12y ago
Years ago, I had issues with several hotel wifis on the east coast. I found that completely disabling NetworkManager and manually connecting was the only work-around. But NetworkManager had to be disabled from startup. If it was started at any point, even if the service was stopped (and a manual connection was attempted) I couldn't connect to the network. It's hit-or-miss.