Networking destroys ip adresses leaving computers out of networks

[Hein van Rensburg]

Binary package hint: kdenetwork

After a weeks frustrations and testing I have become convinced networking is fundementally broken in 8.04. I also believe it has multiple bugs in different places but am not knowledgeable enough to detect where.
The system currently barely works for a single computer which can connect to internet with network manager. It connects wity pppoeeconf, but shows no IP adresses in network manager nor in systems settings-network.

I have a office with switch/ADSL router which connects 4 computers. The router is also the network DHCP server. Any computer can connect individually to the internet, but has no IP or Lan identification which gets destroyed in the process.

I removed network manager from all the computers and cleaned up the etc/network/interfaces file. Network manager did not see any interfaces although the computers were connected. After cleaning all the intefaces out of the interfaces file, the interfaces did show up in network manager, but the dsl was disconnected.( Bug 1 in network manager). It worked after I ran sudo pppoeconf on each computer again. However, this put the interfaces into a manual mode and destroyed any networking.

After I removed Knetwork manager, reset and there was no connection. ( I have knemo installed so I can watch the interfaces). I went to system settings and configured the interfaces dhcp. This is where I found bug nr 2. (You have to reconfigure twice before it actually takes and shows a IP address). Most people would be discouraged right here as systems settings does not work properly). I had to reload the gateway and domain name in system settings in each case. Reloading disconnected the computers again and the only way I could get them back on the net was to run sudo pppoeconf again.

This worked, but after switching off and back on, the computer connected but the IP, Gateway and and domain name was destroyed again. ( Bug nr 3).

Soe 8.04 leaves us in a position where you can be connceted to the internet through ASDL ( pppoeconf) juggling, but the network can never work.
Needs urgent attention in different places. Pls help

[Hein van Rensburg (hvralpha)]

This situation is improved in Ubuntu 8.10 and works well with the new network manager in gnome.
We still need a implementation for KDE and I have seen the SUSE folks are working on that to be ready for kde4.3.

Suggest we leave this bug as nobody has done anything about this.

Hein

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

This should be dropped on the kdeadmin front at least, since the network configuration tool (knetworkconf) won't exist in Kubuntu 9.04.

We will have the Network Manager plasmoid, though.