Bend in the Weather

Monday, March 24. 2008

Network Manager Woes

Dear LazyWeb,

NetworkManager appears to have become the de-facto networking tool under the dominant graphical X-Window manager environments (Gnome or KDE; which uses KNetworkManager).

As such it's heavily coupled into most Gnome and KDE desktop environments these days.
Whilst NM works well in a wired environment, it seems to trip up for many on wireless networking setups.

I'm wondering if someone who's dabbled a bit further than myself can provide me a solution?!

The Background is:

MythTV runs on a PC in the lounge connected to a Plasma TV.
Distro is a fresh x86-64 Ubuntu 8.04 (beta release) install. All updates applied.
Automatic GDM login is enabled (no-one wants to type in a username/password just to watch TV).
Network Manager starts, and decides it needs to get access to the Gnome-Keyring to get the WPA2-PSK key for the wireless card.
The Gnome-Keyring password has to be entered before NetworkManager can access the actual keyring.

An example of Gnome Keyring prompting for a password so Network Manager can connect is below:

Above: Starting Linux with a password-less GDM login,
Network Manager won't start until the Gnome-keyring password is entered.
(Click picture for a larger image)

Other interesting features:

It appears some users have had success with Network Manager auto-connecting if they do enter a password at login. It appears they accomplished this by modifying /etc/pam.d/gdm. (this includes installing pam_keyring).
Obviously with an automatic gdm login, the file in question to edit is /etc/pam.d/gdm-autologin; however doing so it does not appear to actually work. (You're still prompted for a password by gnome-keyring).
The docs on the GnomeKeyring/Pam wiki page also highlights the need to login from the GDM manager. Automatic login doesn't appear to be catered for.

My question to the LazyWeb is this:

"Using an autologin gdm environment, can one get NetworkManager to start and connect to a PSK wireless network without prompting for the default Gnome-Keyring password?"

Feel free to post comments or shed any suggestions, experience or working solutions.

Update: It seems the answer was easier than first thought. Just load gnome-keyring-manager and change the password to a blank password. Thanks to a comment written in Bug #181281 documented in Launchpad, I discovered the simple solution!

It works a treat!

Posted by Matt in Apps, Linux at 22:59 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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