Free networkmanager software for linux

KNetworkManager is the KDE front end for NetworkManager. KNetworkManager project provides a sophisticated and intuitive user interface which enables users easily to switch their network environment.

The range of functions encompasses the features implemented by NetworkManager daemon. Up until now NetworkManager supports:

Wired Ethernet Devices (IEEE 802.3)
Wireless Ethernet Devices (IEEE 802.11): Unencrypted, WEP, WPA Personal, WPA Enterprise
Virtual Private Network (VPN): OpenVPN, VPNC
Dial-Up (PPP)

How does it work?

For both, Wireless LAN and Wired LAN, NetworkManager supports devices known to HAL. Unless working in offline mode, NetworkManager tries to keep the system connected at any time. For this, NetworkManager follows the following policy.

Once started, NetworkManager asks HAL about available network interfaces. If a wired network interface with a carrier is found, NetworkManager connects to this. Either by DHCP (default) or by setting up previously defined static configuration. Later on, when KNetworkManager starts up, NetworkManager will expose its information about network devices and wireless networks found by scanning to the applet.

At this point, if a user decides to unplug the wired connection, NetworkManager will not connect to an arbitrary wireless network. By default all available networks are untrusted. Only if a user decides to connect to a network manually once, this specific network n henceforth being marked as trusted.

n = { ESSID, Hardware address or addresses of the access point}

The trusted networks are stored individually for each user. KNetworkManager stores them and informs NetworkManager about the known, trusted networks. If a wired connection drops due to unplugging the cable NetworkManager will automatically connect to a trusted network. As this step was done without user interaction, NetworkManager will reconnect to the wired connection once it has a carrier.

If a user joins a wireless network by manual intervention (e.g. user clicks on a network listed in the context menu of KNetworkManager or connects to a hidden wireless network), NetworkManager will take down any previous connection. If one unplugs the wired connection after such a step, NetworkManager will not connect to the wired connection once it has a carrier.

Easy various links manager or Everest Linux Links Manager (evlinks) is a network manager and config toolkit that aims to replace network services and networkmanager.

Tthe design of evlinks:

1. use mac address as config file names to avoid interface name change.

2. multi profile support, for example, you can have a setting for Office and another setting for home.

3. never display info such as "eth0/wlan0/ath0" to users. what is the meaning of this strange words for normal user?

4. coupled loosely, if any component of evlinks crash or can not work, others works very well.

5. policy support: for example, whether start wired at booting time,whether start wireless at booting time,offline or online, if wired line unpluged, shall we switch to wireless?

The components of evlinks:

1. evlinkslo/evlinksboot:

run at system booting.
enable loopback and other interfaces according to config file.

2. evlinksiw, wireless config tool

3. evlinkswireless, a wrapper for evlinksiw to handle multiple wireless adapters. if you only have one wireless adapter, it will start evlinksiw directly.

4. evlinksw, wired config tool, support multiple profiles.

5. evlinkswired, same as evlinkswireless, a wrapper for evlinksw to handle multiple wired adapter.

6. evlinksmonitor, a hal client to monitor the adapter changes. since it use hal, then we can catch the signal when new adapter plugged and removed.

7. evlinkstraffic, network traffic monitor. used in evlinksmonitor and evlinkspppoe.

8. evlinkspppoe, PPPoE clients, used to connect ADSL(no PPPoA support)

9. evlinksdispatcher and evlinksrun. dirty code to help normal user run it easily.that is to say, normal user use evlinksrun to call evlinks utils, they all run as super user. it is not a good design, also had security problem, need change later.

ypbind-mt is a multi-threaded implementation of a NIS binding daemon. ypbind-mt compiles and works on Linux with glibx 2.x (libc6).
It should work on every System with POSIX threads and glibc 2.x. ypbind-mt works under Linux with libc5 and linuxthreads 0.7.1, but this C library isnt really thread safe and shouldnt be used with threads.
Main features:
- Supports bindings to multiple domains.
- Supports /var/yp/binding/* file for Linux libc 4/5 and glibc 2.x.
- Supports a list of known secure NIS server (/etc/yp.conf)
- Binds to the server which answered as first if the old one is down.
- Check all 15 minuts, if the current server is really the fastest.
Enhancements:
- ypbind has now DBUS support to watch network status messages from NetworkManager (if NetworkManager is used).