Wed, Nov 11, 2009
WICD
Posted to Technology category
In my ongoing quest to get samba working again with the vmware images, I realized that part of the problem may be that the network was not getting set up soon enough at boot time. (Samba worked for a couple of days after I get it set up, but I'm nt sure it came back after the next reboot.) The vmware images were coming up with their network connections in strange states after the main machine rebooted, which seemed suspicious... or at least unhelpful.
The NetworkManager tool that comes with Karmic Kubuntu was not setting up the link until after I logged into the X window system. This could be a problem for samba because the authentication module that wanted to talk to the Active Directory server could not reach it until networking was running and vmware was up. Getting the networking stack to be active as soon as possible after boot would help the handshaking initialize properly.
The lack of a working network at boot time may be making DB2 unhappy, too.
I had given up on Network Manager completely in previous OS versions. But that meant I needed to manually edit the /etc/network/interfaces file whenever I needed to use the wireless connector in a different environment -- at the office, or a hotel, for example.
I hoped there was a way to make my wireless connection more flexible, even with the vmware subnet bridged off it. One of these days I want to get wired ethernet run to the livingroom and bedroom from the study where the DSL modem and router live, but for now I need to use the wireless connection for things it's not really configured for.
A bit of googling suggested that a tool called "wicd" would provide connect-at-boot, and also the flexibility to support some of the fairly strange networking requirements I have. I haven't tried a wired connection with it yet, but the wireless one seems to be doing what I wanted it to.
So far, so good.
Next step, get the samba permissions working again. Then get DB2 up. Then do the development and testing I'm really supposed to be working on.