NetworkManager 0.9.10 | Hacker News Reader

NetworkManager 0.9.10

blogs.gnome.org

56 pointsbkor12 comments

It's nice that they're finally adding features to make administration less asinine, like a curses UI (long overdue), the ability to edit connection information without automatically reloading, somewhat-less-broken VPN behavior, etc.

For too long NetworkManager has been a "use this if you're lazy and normal" solution. In practice, I don't know any user who does more than a conventional wifi/wired connection that kept it enabled.

On the one hand, it's good that they're addressing this. On the other, it's kind of astonishing that stuff hadn't yet come in all of the years that Ubuntu and Gnome have been trying to stuff NetworkManager down everyone's throats.

Um nmcli is plenty useful and has been for sometime. I use it+bash to bring up a randomly selected VPN endpoint at login. It's worked well for that and any other normal VPN stuff I need it to do for a while now.

It is nice to have curses interface for those that like that kind of thing. To me the biggest improvement will be the ability for it to get along with other methods of interface control like ip,config,etc.

NM is fine for non-server use cases. Looks like now it will be that much better.

Does anyone know if NM now supports multiple simultaneous VPN connections? I couldn't find this in the changelog here: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/pl...

I was using several VPN connections for quite a while now. At least 2 years (it could work before that, i just didn't have to use more than one vpn before)

Were you connecting to them at the same time? That has never worked for me (the first one gets disconnected when I connect the second). I had to use Gopenvpn for that.

Yes. In fact I am using it right now. What I suspect your VPN fails routing. When using more than one VPN you need to be sure to have proper routing for each. In my case it was a matter of checking "Use only for resources on this network" on IPv4 Routes page.

So happy to see work going into making it way easier to recover from system breakage. I've spent too much time fumbling with setting up a WPA wifi connection with nmcli to fix a broken desktop. :)

If it all works, it'll be pretty impressive

It'd be a first if it works properly. NM has been a pain point for me for years. There is always something that doesn't work properly.

Also it's impossible to debug easily. VPN not connecting? NO DOCUMENTATION.

Typically when something doesn't want to work as well you end up with a "download the latest VPN RPM" situation which doesn't actually compile against that version of NM because the API is unstable as hell.

Oh and now we have systemd joining the party.

wicd-gtk is great for X. wicd-curses is great for cli. all-in-all, wicd just works and isn't to fussy.

Unfortunately, development stopped over 2 years ago. At least for me, it didn't work flawlessly as wifi connections were randomly dropped every couple of minutes or hours - switching to NM solved that.

It's a good lightweight solution for many users, but it doesn't even support essential features like pppoe connections. Nevermind VPN and other stuff.

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