Network-Manager 0.9.2 WiFi password issues

I've noticed a few significant issues with Network Manager on GNOME 3.2, when connecting to WiFi networks that require password (e.g. WPA, EAP). Trying to find existing bug reports, I've found quite a mess: multiple bug reports, both downstream (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora) and upstream (GNOME bugzilla).

I suspect many of these bugs are related to the same root cause (or max. 2-3 root causes). In order to try and make sense of this, I tried to categorize the bugs I've found. I hope it'll help to gather more info to resolve the bugs, and reject dups.

  1. NM (gnome applet?) forgets passwords:
    1. GNOME Bugzilla: [666465], [665431], [665503]
    2. Debian BTS: [651445], [646018]
    3. Ubuntu BTS: [904666]
    4. Mint forum post with a workaround
  2. NM takes too long to re-connect after resume (possibly problem in popping up the enter-password dialog box):
    1. GNOME: [664289],
    2. Debian: [651358], [653076]
  3. NM-gnome double password dialog box case:
    1. GNOME: [661208], [665503] - mentioned in 1st comment,
    2. Debian: [651097]

I'll try to update this post when new info arrives, please add your comments.

Generally speaking, I think that FOSS community lacks some "dirty-work" QA workforce for bug scrubbing, such as what I'm trying to do here. I don't even know how to name this non-coding activity. Thoughts? 🙂

Update1: This Linux Mint forum post suggests that only the applet "forgets" passwords.


2 thoughts on “Network-Manager 0.9.2 WiFi password issues

  1. John Hardin

    I recently changed my WPA password to be long and heavily-punctuated to make brute-forcing more difficult, and on my Gentoo laptop with NetworkManager 0.9.mumble when I change the password via the applet or via the Network Connections admin tool, the change will work and persists until reboot, at which point the password is truncated.

    I need to play with it a little to see if it's consistently truncating at the same point, and see if it appears to be a length issue or a poisonous punctuation mark...

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