network manager turns wireless password to hex

[Scott Ringwelski]

Binary package hint: network-manager

Under certain encryption types the NetworkManager turns the entered password for accessing wireless internet into hex. This bug has been going on through multiple releases, including this one.

THIS BUG IS IMPORTANT as if you don't have internet, you can't update ubuntu to fix the problem in the first place!!!

This has been going on for too long, and scaring away too many potential users. This bug NEEDS to be fixed ASAP.

[Tom Chiverton (bugs-launchpad-net-falkensweb)]

Although it's 'only' a GUI thing (subsequent password prompts are "full of garbage rather than my password") it's really really important to fix this as the user experience is very poor - they don't know it's not Ubuntu failing to correctly store their password, and hence has supplied a wrong password to the network, for instance.

[Julien Sorel (paradirc)]

I confirm I have the same problem.

When I try to connect to my WPA, network-manager asks me for the password. A few seconds later, network-manager asks me for the password again (of course, I am sure the password is correct) and I can see in the password field the WPA-PSK instead of the ASCII passphrase.

However, I am not sure it is a network-manager problem. I also tried to establish the connection with /etc/network/interfaces (without using network-manager) but I am still unable to connect to my WPA. The association between my SSID and my encryption key seems to be non persistent and breaks in 10 seconds. Successive calls to 'iwconfig' show me that etheir the SSID or the encryption key goes away. It is something similar to this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/293869

I think there may be a link between these two bugs because I have them both. When I use the 'wl' driver directly, the connection breaks immediately (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/293869 ?) but, when I use ndiswrapper to fix the problem, I have the problem we are discussing here.

[Scott Ringwelski (sgringwe)]

my netwrok info:

linksys rounter
wpa-personal
tkip encryption

i don't think you know how much i want to use ubuntu/linux mint/linux. all the other linux distros look ugly except the gnome one's like ubuntu and the one's like linux mint that are based of ubuntu. i've been trying for 2 years (different problems, this most recent). ubuntu is supposed to "just work"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Julien Sorel (paradirc)]

I know Ubuntu developers have a lot of work to do, but I would appreciate some feedback here. If some information is missing, just say it and you will receive it quickly! Waiting for 6 months to finally see the previous bug report closed with "Won't Fix" because it began to be too difficult to track was not really funny and I would not want to experience the same thing for this one :(

[Scott Ringwelski (sgringwe)]

Yes this is the same bug as 293963. I made this one because someone in 293963 said to make a new one for jaunty.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please open a terminal and execute: apport-collect 377643 ? It will attach the necessary information to this report. Also you can submit more information for it by looking to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingNetworkManager , Thanks in advance.

[Tony Espy (awe)]

This has been fixed in NM 0.8 which is now included in Karmic.

This will not be fixed in Jaunty due to the SRU policy. We may try to make NM 0.8 available for Jaunty users via the Network Manager PPA, however right now our focus is finishing Karmic.

I changed the description to remove the release, and "wicd" which has nothing to do with the network-manager package. Bugs in "wicd" need to be reported against it's source package, not network-manager.