router security

[Jerry Houston]

On Sunday 24 May 2009 19:33:36 NoOp wrote:
>
> For my money I'll go with wicd out of the gate in all except testing
> situations. NM (IMO) has pretty much been a PITA from day one, and the
> recent changes (again IMO) have simply made it worse. 

For what it's worth, I used NM when I set up my laptop with Ubuntu 9.04, 
because it was the default and it worked okay with my Atheros wireless card.

But when I got tired of the interaction between the Gnome desktop and my 
laptop (couldn't move the mouse without constantly changing desktops), I 
decided to try KDE.  (I've used it for years with SuSE, so I'm already 
familiar with it.)

Running KDE, I couldn't get NM to connect to my network.  I'm not sure if it 
was the entire problem, but every time I set my subnet mask from 
255.255.255.0, it was changed to 0.  I understand /3 as an abbreviation, but 
I've never seen 0 used that way.

Maybe NM would have worked with DHCP, but although my router supports that, it 
doesn't do a good job of DNS in this mixed system, so I need to assign static 
IP addresses.

Back in Gnome, I installed wicd based on recommendations in this thread, and 
to my surprise it not only WORKED in KDE, but it even maintained (or 
automatically restarted) the connection I'd been using in the Gnome session.

And not only did it not trash my subnet mask, but it even provided the correct 
value as a default.  And then properly filled in my gateway address for me.  
It's dead simple to use, and it works.

That's good enough for me.

    Jerry in Bothell, WA

BTW:  Never used NM on SuSE, either.  Always preferred the traditional ifup.