Paul - The Programmer

simple & stupid

Good Linux tool, Network Manager.

Network Manager is a GUI application powered by dbus for network configuration. Network Manager provides a user-friendly interface to set up the wired and wireless network interface.

Network Manager consists of a background daemon process running as root and a front-end applet application.

Install Network Manager with command,

$ sudo apt-get install network-manager network-manager-gnome

To utilize the Network Manager, for Debian users, the user has to be a member of netdev group. For other distribution users, the similar user privileges are required.

$ sudo usermod -a -G netdev paul

Verify the user group setting with

$ id paul
uid=1000(paul) gid=1000(paul) groups=1000(paul),4(adm),24(cdrom),25(floppy),29(audio),44(video),46(plugdev),109(netdev),110(bluetooth),116(scanner)

By default, Network Manager only handles the interface not declared in /etc/network/interfaces.

Not declared interface means the interface is not described in the interface or the interface is disableed with a #NetworkMangaer# prefix.

For instance,

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
#NetworkManager#iface eth0 inet dhcp

To enable Network Manager to handle the interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces, the Network Manager's configuration file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf should be updated as:

[main]
plugins=ifupdown,keyfile

[ifupdown]
managed=true

Then restart network-manager service:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart