[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#461831: network-manager: provide connections before login

[Ross Boylan]

Package: network-manager
Version: 0.6.5-3
Severity: wishlist

It would be useful if network-manager would connect to known networks
when the system came up, rather than when the user logs in.  There are
lots of things the system does regardless of whether anyone is logged
in, and some of those things fail without network access (e.g., email,
time syncronization, possibly running various scripts).

This wish seems to contradict the theory of operation outlined in the
upstream README, so it is, in effect, a request to reconsider the
design.  As I understand the current design, information on what
networks to connect to, as well as passwords, is kept in a user
session and is private to the user.

A possible middle ground would be to allow the user to designate
certain connection information as available for system-wide use.

Currently, my boot-up is also delayed as dhcp-client attempts to get
dhcp information--which it can't, since there are no network
connections.  That particular problem may have a less drastic
solution--maybe remove the interface declaration entirely from
/etc/network/interfaces?  The current Debian README seems to indicate
things should work with interfaces set auto and dhcp (and nothing
else), but it looks to me as if the regular processing of the
interfaces file kicks in a start up.  Network manager does grab them
later.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-3-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages network-manager depends on:
ii  adduser                     3.105        add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus                        1.1.2-1      simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  dhcdbd                      3.0-1        D-Bus interface to the ISC DHCP cl
ii  hal                         0.5.10-5     Hardware Abstraction Layer
ii  ifupdown                    0.6.8        high level tools to configure netw
ii  iproute                     20071016-3   Professional tools to control the 
ii  iputils-arping              3:20071127-1 Tool to send ICMP echo requests to
ii  libc6                       2.7-5        GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3                 1.1.2-1      simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2            0.74-1       simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgcrypt11                 1.4.0-3      LGPL Crypto library - runtime libr
ii  libglib2.0-0                2.14.3-1     The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgpg-error0               1.4-2        library for common error values an
ii  libhal1                     0.5.10-5     Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libiw29                     29-1         Wireless tools - library
ii  libnl1-pre6                 1.0~pre6-5   Library for dealing with netlink s
ii  libnm-util0                 0.6.5-3      network management framework (shar
ii  lsb-base                    3.1-24       Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
ii  wpasupplicant               0.6.0-4      Client support for WPA and WPA2 (I

Versions of packages network-manager recommends:
ii  network-manager-kde           1:0.2-2    KDE systray applet for controlling

-- no debconf information