# Network Management and W.A.F.

## depontius

The new laptop is on the way.  My wife would like to be able to use it by herself.

In the past the excuse has always been that it's "the work laptop", so I've done things rather manually - called wpa_gui from the command line, start OpenVPN that way, too.  She uses xfce, and it would be good to make it all easy for her to use - click this button or that.

I have a bit of a bias against networkmanager, and I understand that wicd doesn't do VPNs, and may be dead, any way.

I'm also not against scripting something up myself, and hooking it to an xfce applet button.

I'm curious how others have handled this kind of situation.

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## gerdesj

 *depontius wrote:*   

> The new laptop is on the way.  My wife would like to be able to use it by herself
> 
> I'm curious how others have handled this kind of situation.

 

Me and the missus use NetworkManager + SystemD + KDE + the Fedora firewall thing (forget the name but it's easy and just works).  KDE has widgets for all of these and my life is easier.  I used to have a really involved /etc/conf.d/net but now I don't bother and it just works.

Wifey uses Arch - she doesn't know what it is and doesn't care provided it works.

I use Gentoo all over the shop and with my laptop spend a lot of time on a lot of different networks - WiFi, Ethernet, IPSEC, OpenVPN, tethering to phones etc and need ease of config.

I can remember having to mess with networking on Gentoo (wicd or wpa_supplicant, worrying about ndiswrapper etc etc) and now I don't - without looking I couldn't even tell you how I actually get WiFi anymore, I used to use wpa_supplicant and I presume I still do.  I spend a lot of my work time getting other things to talk on networks efficiently and don't need to fight my own laptop. 

I don't know LXDE particularly well but I know Raspian on the Raspberry Pi (GUI uses LXDE) has an applet to configure WiFi and I would image that uses Networkmanager so you should be able to use that.

I'd bin the bias against NM unless you can point at a real failing, rather than a bias.

Cheers

Jon

PS I also add in lldpd to help find out what I am connected to - very handy.

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## tclover

Read Network management using DHCPCD article and its related forums thread (linked to it if necessary); add DHCPCD-UI and permission to wheele group for network management; and be done with it. Yu can even set up some default SSID in wpa_supplicant.conf and generate passphrase for each SSID with `wpa_passphrase'; remoe WPA S. from any runlevel, add dhcpcd to default; and be done with it definitely without bloat ware.

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