Hi all, I'd like to start by saying that I just updated my work laptop to ibex from gutsy, and it's almost amazing how much nm has improved. For the first time in using ubuntu for about 4 years, it's actually gotten to the point it handles all my varied connections of wired/wireless/cdma and cisco vpn's without some kind of my own bastard scripts and hacks. I consult with customers using just about any kind of config for vpn and wireless, and it works pretty darn great so far. Kudos to the team for making my life easier!
That being said, the more I tinkered with it, the more I found a few annoyances I was curious if anyone's fixed or considered dealing with as a long-term strategy. I've been following the list for some time, and haven't seen any direct mention of these, so I figured either I'm weird, or no one else does what I do (yet), so I figure I'd mention them to see if I can offer some recommendations to consider for future improvements. 1) I noticed with the VPN import functions that they can handle cisco PCF files, but it doesn't fully import them the nice way kvpnc does. I think that it's a conscious choice not to flaunt breaking cisco's weak *encryption* on their saved strings, but it would be nice if it did none the less. Ibex seems to have broken Cisco's own vpn, leaving me stranded to get this working, so I found a blob of c code to decrypt it for me, which I could then manually reassemble a profile. It'd be nice to see it natively import it, as simply not all the times do customers have (or sometimes remember) the keys outside of the grandfathered .pcf file from long ago. Along with this hack to decrypt the key, I found some shell and perl code to dump a director of cisco .pcf's to vpnc .conf's, however NM doesn't seem to make use of these at all. It would be nice if it could suck the legacy vpnc directory for import into it's secure store (I believe gnome-keyring..?). Otherwise very sweet being able to use NM for vpn purposes to replace cisco's lack of decent linux support! 2) Gnome keyring doesn't play nice when using fingerprint readers, namely thinkfinger libs. Profiles won't automagically connect on boot, and often I have to use my password instead of a swipe. Annoying only due to lack of consistency whereas it normally works without a hitch. I've read up on the fact that gnome keyring doesn't use pam, and hence cannot use the thinkfinger authentication methods, but it seems there should be a more graceful solution. I'm definitely not the only person feeling this pain, but thus far I've not found any constructive ways to lessen/fix the issue.r Since fingerprint readers are becoming more common, it seems it might be worth exploring a better way to eliminate the need to always auth outside of the login session (or consistently use fingerprints for gnome keyring). I'm positive that I'm over-simplifying the problem, so feel free to kick me or ask for more info. Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree, and should blame the gnome keyring dev's instead, but since you've chosen to use its use for NM, it stands to reason you might want to look at cleaning up an ugly loose-end to an otherwise stellar product. I'd be happy to provide debugging info to assist if needed. 3) Dialup support is gone now? Dialup is so 90's now, but unfortunately bluetooth DUN is still alive and kicking. However, I couldn't seem to find a way to use this in NM currently, nor could I find any way to enable it. Am I missing something here to enable it, or was it just simply (finally) removed and to be considered legacy? Seems there'd still be a lot of people stuck using traditional dialup to abandon them entirely... I've always written my own scripts/confs for wpa_supplicant for connecting to various wifi profiles as NM has never quite worked properly for me, but its nice to see it's really almost there a good solution. Nice it even worked with my vzw aircard flawlessly! Thanks for the hard work in making NM a large part of linux mainstream adoption! -mb _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
