wired, wireless and vpn network mess

English Network/Internet
1

I just installed openSUSE 11.1 on my laptop, but this made quite a mess of my network, more than previously with openSUSE 10.3
I have:

At home a static IP at eth0. The interface is configured via Yast to have a fixed IP of 192.168.1.223, default route and nameserver of 192.168.1.1. Network manager always goes for dhcp, so that isn’t an option.

At the university, I need to connect to the wireless network. the network manager is far too simple and I can’t find the necessary options, so I run a smal shell script that uses wpa_supplicant. The gui for wpa_supplicant doesn’t work, so it’s a shellscript for me. Then, I need an IP from the DHCP server. Somehow, dhcpcd doesn’t change the default route like it used to. Instead of getting the one from the DHCP server of the university, it leaves the old one I use at home, 192.168.1.1.

So, I remove the default route before I connect. This makes dhcpcd add the right default route. But, back at home, dns stopped working. dhcpcd modified /etc/resolv.conf, but back at home I want to use 192.168.1.1. With suse 10.3, this always went right without me looking after it. Now, I need to modify /etc/resolv.conf. In yast however,still only 192.168.1.1 is mentioned as nameserver, and yast doesn’t update /etc/resolv.conf, but my network only seems to listen to what /etc/resolv.conf has to say.

I hope I fixed it by leaving the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf and adding the one from home, and telling dhcpcd not to modify /etc/resolv.conf.

So that seems to work, now I want to connect to the vpn of the university. I use kvpnc, because the network manager had far too little options for a PPTP connection. This works, but I have to add 3 command to fix the routing. I did that before, and kvpnc can do it for me, but my network seems a mess. And kvpnc can’t disconnect.

How can I get everything to work orderly? Yast doesn’t always work, network manager is far too limited, gwpa_supplicant never works, kvpnc doesn’t disconnect and shell scripts and config files are a mess and don’t work the neat way.

And if I want to connect to another wireless network? network manager doesn’t play together with yast, so that isn’t an option. In yast I only seems to be able to connect to one wireless network. And Yast also doesn’t work if I change to IP of my wireless card for fixed to none, it still keeps the IP, making a mess.

2

Hum. While I haven’t play with VPNs much, you might be able to do all you need with Network Manager. I configured YAST to use Network Manager for both my wired and wireless interfaces. My knetworkmanager allows me to have configurations with static IP address. It works fine for me with WPA2(AES) access points.

Something I’ve done is add scripts to /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts and add links to the in /etc/sysconfig/network/{if-down.d,if-up.d} to automatically add a second IP when I’m using a wired connection. You might be able to accomplish much that way.

Finally, the ifup and ifdown create different configuration that do the work for you.

3

Network manager is not a good option:

For the wired network, it always goes for DHCP instead of a fixed ip, even if I set up a connection with a fixed IP and telll it to autoconnect. And, somehow the networkmanager doesn’t start when I boot up.

The VPN settings are very limited, I need a PPTP connection, but no options whatsoever about that.

I have to check again, but for the wireless network at my university I need some options I couldn’t find in the network manager.

Unless somebody knows how to fix this, it doesn’t really work out for me.

4

I found the needed options for the wireless network in the network manager, but when I want to save them, some options aren’t saved. I can set then 10 times and save them, but the network manager forgets about them. I tries one attempt to connect, then it doesn’t even try anymore.

Even if I want to use the network manager, it just doesn’t work. Maybe some bugs?