KDE Network Manager Intermittently Can't Find AP
 

This is an issue that I'm really struggling with. Using OpenSuSe 12.1 with KDE V4.7.2 Release 5 and this Network Manager is just plain unreliable. Every other time I start the machine for whatever reason the Network Manager can't see my Access Point. That is until I run:

Then magically the NetworkManager comes back to life and auto connects to my AP.

This machine is a laptop so hacking away at wpa_supplicant to hard wire to a specific AP just doesn't work for me. Does anyone know what I can do to get a reliable, persistent connection to my AP? In Slackware I use wicd and it always works flawlessly but it doesn't look like wicd is an option for OpenSuSe, at least not without creating a real mess of the repository system.

For WiCd, it looks like I had to add network:utilities and for the kde client looks as if it was in the kde repo. You have a different version of openSUSE so YMMV.

I don't find that WiCd is quite flawless in reliability - sometimes it stutters on resume from standby and the error messages as it logs in seem to be out of sync with the actual actions (ie, the error message seems to pop up just after the actual process has got beyond that stage). But, broadly, having WiCd is better than not having WiCd, so I'm relatively happy to live with that, for a while.

Sometimes (quite rarely) my AP also gets its underwear into a non-smooth state and needs re-setting, but this is really quite rare. In this case, I think an AP firmware update may be called for, but I haven't done anything about that either (yet)...

You do have a healthy signal strength, don't you?

Yea, the signal strength is 85% and I have just discovered that if I open the Network Manager each time I log in and un-check 'Enable Wireless' and then re-check 'Enable Wireless' then Network Manager finds the AP and connects. I really hate have to do this every single time I log into the machine.

I found this article: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Wicd so I'm gonna give that a try when I get some free time.

I got this solved after a lot of effort.

I installed wicd and it behaved in the exact same way as NetworkManager so I removed it and re-installed NetworkManager. Reviewing the logs I spotted the source of the error, which was something like: access point '<AP>' has security, but secrets are required (no-secrets error). This led me to believe that the configuration didn't know my WPA2 passphrase, even though its clearly set in the interface.

Reviewing the config file: /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/<AP> I noticed that the passphrase was not in that file so I added the necessary lines and set the connection as a 'System' connection and now its working correctly.

This machine did its first update (and there were a lot of them) when this trouble started so it seems that an upgrade broke the connection original (working) configuration.