I'm just going to throw this out there to see in anyone else has experienced what I have.

This morning I decided that I would get rid of Slackware64-current and do a fresh install of Slackware64-13.37 and remove the KDE set and install Xfce 4.10 from SalixBang. ( http://download.tuxfamily.org/salixb...alixbang/xfce/ )

I had been running -current since Pat included KDE 4.8 back in April and during this time my ASUS RT-N13U Rev.B1 router would crap out at least 4 times a day forcing me to reboot it. (Some days more, some days less) I was starting to think that the router was failing until today. In fact, I was going to go to Fry's today to pick up a new router.

I have been running this fresh install for 15 hours now and not once have I had to reboot the router. Within the past few months I would have rebooted it at least once or twice by now.

I think that I have narrowed it down to NetworkManager that is part of KDE in -current. I am using the latest Wicd, 1.7.2.4, with this fresh install. I have no proof of this, it is just an observation that I made.

Everything is running great with the setup I have now. I hope to see Xfce 4.10 in the next release, it is pretty slick.

Does anyone believe that this may be the cause of the router issues I experienced? Like I said, just throwing this out there to see if I am sane.

Can't say I have experienced router issues, but NetworkManager does have it's fair share of issues that do not happen with Wicd.
Specifically, it seems that it's necessary with NM to delete every connection when finished with as the next time you try to connect to a previously used one, you get no routing tables written, and therefore no internet access. And this happens both on the home network, with a 100% signal strength, as well as various work/public, secured and open networks.
Leads me to run Wicd most of the time.

As far as I can tell, the only advantage to NM over Wicd is the mobile/3g dongle support. Once Wicd supports those it will be a big goodbye to NM.

Now if only there was an easy way to switch between the two??

@vdemuth, I do not recognize the issues with NetworkManager you are describing. But switching back to WICD is as easy as "chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager ; chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.wicd" and rebooting.

@SqdnGuns, your issue may be caused by failing UPnP support in your router. KDE 4.8.x has UPnP support in the "solid" network library through the new herqq package. This UPnP support is disabled by default (because it can cause crashes in some KDE applications) but you can enable it by adding "export SOLID_UPNP=1" to your login profile.

Even with it being disabled in solid, your network may still see UPnP traffic, and if your router has UPnP enabled that may lead to crashes. Far too many router firmwares are unable to cope with this kind of network traffic. Try disabling it in the router before you go back to Slackware 13.37.

Eric

Hi Eric,

I know I can switch to Wicd as you describe. Perhaps I should have been more succinct and asked to be able to switch from NM to Wicd (and back again as required) 'on the fly' so to speak. Is that even possible when a reboot is required?

You cannot switch back and forth on the fly because both programs start a daemon. If you want to control that daemon with a NM or WICD client then the daemon has to be running before you start the desktop GUI.

A reboot is not really needed, you can just stop NM and start WICD and it will use its preconfigured settings, but if you do that from within KDE you will not be able to control it until you logout and login again.

Eric

Well that could be the opening of an interesting discussion.
So many times on here there has been advice about rebooting to enable/disable one service or another, with a usually terse reply of "no need to reboot, this isn't windows"
So also a challenge then to the people out there much cleverer than I could even hope to be.
A way to load/unload daemons dynamically as required by any given piece of software that requires it along with the ability to not have to log out/in from the DE of choice, (in this case KDE) to use that particular piece of software.

Thanks for the feedback Eric. One of the first things that I did when I started getting these random router issues was to disable UPnP but the problem persisted until I did the fresh install of 13.37 without KDE yesterday. 24 hours now and not one issue with the router.

30+ hours without any router issues...........interesting. I would like to pinpoint what the actual problem was. I am strongly leaning to it being I was running -current and NetworkManager.

As software changes a lot within the -current tree, you might be wise to stick to the stable releases until the next major update. Keep in mind that NetworkManager and KDE 4.8.x are NEW packages to the Slackware tree and haven't be completely tested to ensure they are free of bugs and possible glitches. However, I run -current myself without any major issues. The only major bug I have had as of late are severe issues with KDE and my network connectivity being unavailable or unable to reestablish itself even using the daemons to restart the service, however this is a problem with how KDE handles USB based Network adapters.