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KNetworkManager - openSUSE Wiki


KNetworkManager has been completely rewritten as a KDE 4 application for openSUSE 11.2.

What is KNetworkManager?

KNetworkManager is the KDE front end for NetworkManager. It provides a sophisticated and intuitive user interface which enables users easily to switch their network environment.

The range of functions encompasses the features implemented by NetworkManager daemon. Up until now NetworkManager supports:

  • Wired Ethernet Devices (IEEE 802.3)
  • Wireless Ethernet Devices (IEEE 802.11): Unencrypted, WEP, WPA Personal, WPA Enterprise
  • Mobile Broadband Devices (GSM, CDMA, UMTS, ...)
  • Virtual Private Network (VPN): OpenVPN, VPNC
  • Dial-Up (PPP)
  • DSL (PPPoE)

Screenshots

The following screenshots give an overview of the KNetworkManager user interface as shipped with openSUSE 11.2. Click to enlarge.

More screenshots are available at KNetworkManager screenshots.

How does it work? (Technical overview)

For both, Wireless LAN and Wired LAN, NetworkManager supports devices known to HAL. Unless working in offline mode, NetworkManager tries to keep the system connected at any time. For this, NetworkManager follows the following policy.

Once started, NetworkManager asks HAL about available network interfaces. If a wired network interface with a carrier is found, NetworkManager connects to this. Either by DHCP (default) or by setting up previously defined static configuration. Later on, when KNetworkManager starts up, NetworkManager will expose its information about network devices and wireless networks found by scanning to the applet.

At this point, if a user decides to unplug the wired connection, NetworkManager will not connect to an arbitrary wireless network. By default all available networks are untrusted. If a user has connected to a network in the past, the connection has the 'Connect Automatically' checkbox ticked, and the same Access Point is available, this network is trusted and NetworkManager will connect automatically. 

n = { ESSID, Hardware address or addresses of the access point}

The trusted networks are stored individually for each user. KNetworkManager stores them and informs NetworkManager about the known, trusted networks. NetworkManager will connect to wired networks automatically and other connections that have 'connect automatically' checked.

Wireless LAN

NetworkManager follows the Just Works philosophy in order to provide painless access to wireless networks. KNetworkManager provides the graphical user interface in order to allow users to control the NetworkManager daemon. With regard to wireless support, NetworkManager currently supports the following wireless network types:

  • Unencrypted
  • WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
    • Encryption: Passphrase, Hex, ASCII
    • Authentication: Open System, Shared Key
  • LEAP
  • Dynamic WEP (802.1x)
  • WPA Personal (WPA-PSK)
    • WPA-PSK (Pre-shared Key), WPA 1 and WPA 2
    • Protocol: Automatic, TKIP, AES-CCMP
  • WPA Enterprise (WPA-EAP)
    • WPA-EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol), WPA 1 and WPA 2
    • Method: PEAP, TLS, TTLS, LEAP

References:

Wireless LAN [1]
WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) [2]
WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) [3]
TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) [4]
AES-CCMP (AES Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol) [5]
PEAP (Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol) [6]
TLS (Transport Layer Security) [7]
TTLS (Tunneled Transport Layer Security) [8]

Wired LAN (Ethernet)

Not much about wired ethernet devices but they should simply work ;-) You can activate a wired device by clicking the corresponding connection in the context menu. These are not shown if the cable is not plugged in.

SUSE specific: Static configurations for wired devices can be configured using YaST. NetworkManager honors those settings and will not try to set-up such interface using DHCP which is the default.

Cellular

To set up a cellular connection the number is usually *99#. For GSM, you have to know the APN of your cellular service provider, and whether to fill in username and password.

A wizard containing a provider database is under development.

Dial-Up

PPPoE connections should Just Work.

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

NetworkManager currently provides support for the following VPN standards:

  • OpenVPN
  • Cisco-compatible VPN client (vpnc)
  • PPTP (Microsoft)

A Novell VPN (turnpike) plugin is being developed.

Hint: If your VPN does not expect all traffic to be routed over the VPN, including Internet traffic, go to the Routing section of the IPv4 setting for your VPN connection and check 'Use only for resources on this network'.

Hint: KNetworkManager only lists these VPN types if the corresponding plugin is installed. These are packaged as NetworkManager-openvpn-kde4, NetworkManager-vpnc-kde4, and NetworkManager-pptp-kde4

Features

KNetworkManager can set NetworkManager to specific operational modes. It is also possible to disable wireless, Using this mode, NetworkManager will still control wired ethernet connections.

The "Manage Connections..." dialog can be used to view the known, trusted networks. Deleting a network from this list will remove the network from the known networks. On following starts, KNetworkManager will no longer inform NetworkManager about such a network. Thus, NetworkManager itself will not try connect this network.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How can I store passphrases associated with encrypted wireless networks?

The first time KNetworkManager is used, it will try to set up the KDE Wallet (encrypted password storage) to save wireless network passphrases and other passwords. If you choose not to use KWallet, KNetworkManager will store passwords in its configuration files, only readable by the logged in user.

If you change your mind, you can enable the wallet and tell KNetworkManager to use it:

Activate KWallet support:

  1. start kwalletmanager (package kwalletmanager if not installed)
  2. right click wall icon in tray
  3. "Configure Wallet"
  4. Check "Enable the KDE wallet subsystem" on the tab "Wallet Preferences"

Make KNetworkManager store secrets in the wallet:

  1. Open the Manage Connections dialog
  2. Go to the 'Other' page
  3. Go to the 'Connection Secrets' tab
  4. Change the storage location to 'In secure storage (encrypted)'

Further information

KDE UserBase has an overview of how the NetworkManager stack works.

Download

Source

Obsolete versions

Packages

Bugs

Please file bugs using the bugzilla from the KDE project http://bugs.kde.org. The program is developed upstream with cooperation from other distributions so reporting bugs here helps reduce duplicat bug reports

Bug Triage

Refer users to the UserBase article above.

Boilerplate bug response

Thank you for taking the time to report a bug in KNetworkManager. Unfortunately your report does not contain enough information to diagnose the problem. Please see the http://userbase.kde.org/NetworkManagement and especially this section http://userbase.kde.org/NetworkManagement#It.27s_All_KDE.27s_Fault.21 . Provide /var/log/NetworkManager extracts from when you tried to make a connection.