Re: Wired by default & keyring unlocking

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 14:55 +0200, Ruben Vermeersch wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> First: When logging into my GNOME desktop, NM automatically brings up
> the wired connection eth0 (creating it's own subrange, I think), though
> there's no cable attached (ethtool: Link detected: no), how can I debug
> this?

Thanks for the bug report (gnome.org #314768), lets follow this issue up
there in the bugzilla.

> The actual message: When logging into my GNOME desktop, and selecting my
> wireless access point "osaka", which has a WEP key, I get asked to
> unlock my gnome keyring. Is there a way to save WEP keys in an
> unprotected ring, so they are available without unlocking the keyring?
> To me it makes sense to store things like VPN info inside the keyring,
> but how do I go explaining to my mother (which isn't very PC savvy),
> that she has to enter her password to get wireless internet?

Correct, you must enter your keyring password to get the WEP keys the
first time you connect.  We had previously stored them in GConf, but
that means that any application can read the WEP passphrase or key,
which is a fairly large security hole.  So they go in the keyring.
Technically you do need a password to access the wireless internet, it's
your WEP key.  But since that gets stored unecrypted, NetworkManager
protects it in the keychain.  Normally I'm assuming you'd set up your
system configuration to automatically connect to the same access point
all the time with the static configuration files in Ubuntu.

To fix your issue, something we're looking at is to pull from system
configuration in the absence of user configuration.  There's always been
a goal of integrating more with the system config files, just "not right
now" while we got the main parts of NetworkManager up and running.  In
some ways, if the computer your mother is using is not expected to be
moving around (ie, if it's a desktop computer and will always connect to
'osaka'), then NetworkManager may not be right for you just yet.

Dan