GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 359600
Allow manual IP config
Last modified: 2008-08-16 03:43:21 UTC
Currently is not possible to set manually the IP address/netmask/gateway using Network Manager. In order to get Network Manager working on Debian/Ubuntu is required to comment any interface inside of /etc/network/interfaces. So, the only way to set up the network card is using ifconfig directly. Of course, in a notebook is not viable to define always the same IP for the network card.
As a notebook user, I sometimes have to access different networks. Some of those networks employ static IPs and settings. At it's current state, NetworkManager does not allow to set static IPs (not in the form of profiles nor in a manual per-use basis. Some people say this should not be a feature of NM, as gnome's network-admin is already there for this purpose. However, it does not have the flexibility that notebooks require that NM provides. Besides, both tools have conflicts if run together. The most notable being that NM has to be manually killed to use static IPs, because it consistently tries to reset the network card to "what it wants" (it keeps trying to get a DHCP response, even if there is no DHCP server in the network) An easy (but not ideal) way to handle this problem is to allow the user to define the static settings to use in case of a DHCP fail (instead of using the normal 169.* addresses). The setups of profiles would be a much better fix.
I use NM on my notebook too, because of the flexibility. I can even login to my school vpn server via the pptp-plugin for NM. But the fact that it doesn't support static IPs yet is a great drawback. Doing manual IP configuration while on cabled network is no problem with ifconfig. But connecting to a WLAN AP with a static IP is a little harder. As I know nothing about configuring a static IP on WLAN with ifconfig/iwconfig and still being able to connect to the AP. I always have to disable NM and hand over the configuration of the interface to another program. When I leave this environment I have to configure NM again and restart it. This procedure takes a lot of time and could be made easier by NM, if it supported static IPs. I and alot of other people included, use NM for its flexibility. If it had static IP support it would be the all-round-solution for notebooks. Windows users could be converted easier by NM, too. :D Even the network management of windows isn't as appealing as NM. There you have a lot of programs for different things, while NM could bring all this with one program (one tray icon) alone...
Is this a duplicate of bug #156952?
I like to use NetworkManager to 'manage' my VPN sessions. It also provides an easy and intuitive interface to basic network information. However, I also prefer to use Static IP addresses on my home network - to take advantage of port forwarding and various other broadband router features. Static IP's should be detected and handled gracefully - not ignored or overridden.
*** Bug 427709 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 485683 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 475867 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 501344 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Quick status update; static IPs are supported in 0.7 as long as your distro has written a plugin to read it's distro-specific configuration files. The ifcfg plugin (for Fedora and SUSE) is already implemented, and NetworkManager will already respect system settings when the system settings daemon is running. The applet will also show system settings and allow the user to choose between the user's connections and the system connections. To Do: - Refine the UI handling of system settings in the applets - Get inotify support for the ifcfg plugin finished - Finish the WPA and PPP support for the ifcfg plugin - Write more backends to support more distros - Finish support for pushing a user connection system-wide from the connection editor
fixed in trunk