Shell or Console and Network Manger

[dhcolesj]

I moved this from where I had it, as I had it in the wrong area:

Ok, I actually have two questions but, I'm going to separate them out.
This one is simple and a noticed result of the other.
When my XWindows gets completely hosed and I can't login to it, how do I get my "NetworkManager" managed wlan0 to connect?
nm-tool shows the connection but it's "disconnected"
What tool do I use from the shell to get NetworkManager to connect up to the Wireless NIC? (Don't have a Wire to this laptop).

[flarson]

Re: Shell or Console and Network Manger

That is a really good question. I can not find any way to get Network-Manager to do that. It will configure a wired interface for system wide use but requires that the applet be running to give it user info for wireless. The only way I could get wireless to start without X is to edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to add wlan0.

This may be why Intrepid Ibex turns off management of interfaces in the interfaces file by default.

[dhcolesj]

Re: Shell or Console and Network Manger

What did you have to add? The reason I ask is that I use wpa/wpa2 here and I thought about just adding the usuall:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp

or something to that affect. I wondered if I did that would NetworkManager then auto connect when my laptop was booted instead of waiting until I was logged into KDE.

[flarson]

Re: Shell or Console and Network Manger

If you use wpa you will need something like this in /etc/network/interfaces.
auto lo eth0 wlan0
iface lo inet loopback

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid My ssid
wpa-psk my passphrase

Then you want /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf to look like
[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile

[ifupdown]
managed=false

This tells Network-Manager to not do anything with the wlan0 interface and lets it be configured by ifupdown, which will bring it up at boot. You may need some other things with wpa-supplicant but it often works as above.

After you edit those files you can reboot to try it or kill /usr/sbin/nm-system-settings so that Network-Manager will leave your wlan0 alone and then you can use ifdown wlan0 and ifup wlan0 to get the wireless working.