GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 667156
Password dialogs queue up
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:16:29 UTC
Sometimes I'm using my laptop where I only have access to two wireless networks with very low signal strength. It often happens that i get disconnected randomly and then get shown the password dialog. Now when I go away and leave the laptop running for a while, after I come back, there are multiple password dialogs for the two networks queued up. (Some from gnome-shell, some from nm-applet as described in #662338). In the gnome-shell dialogs when i click cancel the next one from the queue shows up. There should be only the most recent dialog. These dialogs also prevent the screensaver from starting so that after I'm done clicking away all those dialogs the screen finally fades to black. Also when cancelling those dialogs too fast I have seen gnome-shell crashing. (No backtrace yet; I first have to find a way to reliably add enough dialogs to reproduce the crash)
Dialogs queuing up is certainly a bug per-se. But in bug 664495, Jon said we should never ask for password without user action; this doesn't seem to be technically possible currently, according to Giovanni. Also, are you storing your WiFi passphrases in the keyring? If yes, then there's another problem.
No, the passphrases are not stored in the keyring but by NetworkManager as both connections are available to all users. If the password dialogs show up the password fields are already filled out, so they are remembered correctly. I guess the dialog just shows up, because of a failed connection attempt, which i think NM assumes might be because of a wrong password but in reality is because of the low connection strength.
(In reply to comment #2) > I guess the dialog just shows up, because of a failed connection attempt, which > i think NM assumes might be because of a wrong password but in reality is > because of the low connection strength. Yeah, that's a current limitation with NM, I'd like to know whether that's fixable or not. In the present case, this behavior is quite unfortunate.
Does this still happen with 3.4?
Yes.
See also bug 676278.
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