Sorry for a potential long and windy post:
I work in an IT department, where we use Active Directory on a Windoze server for authentication.
I liked OpenSUSE 10.3’s ability to authenticate to an AD domain, and even better 11.0, which I installed on a ACER TravelMate 5710 laptop.
My problem, however, is that we don’t use wired network in the building, but wireless.
So, I have a chicken-and-egg problem: My users can’t authenticate towards the AD, because they need to authenticate before the wireless connection is started.
Once logged in to the computer, the connection works perfectly, however.
I know there is an option to cache the credentials, but it’s not a particulary good idea to keep using that all the time. It’s also a hazzle to need to bring the machine and users to one of the few wired points, connect the machine and let them log in for the first time. (I’ve got a few hundred potential users for a particular machine…)
My question: Is there any way to configure OpenSUSE to start and establish the wireless connection before the login screen appears, or when the login screen appears, like in Windoze?
Please keep in mind I can still be counted as a noob as I still don’t know much about Linux…
Thanks!