The configuration module in the TDE Control Center is perhaps the most useful part of
the KWiFiManager suite. Here you can actually change the basic settings of your
wireless LAN card. The module can manage up to ten independent configurations for the
card. If you dont need that many configurations, you can reduce the number of configs
shown at any time by changing the Number of Configurations entry.
If you have configured your wireless settings with a distribution-specific tool, chances are good
that the TDE Control Center module will automatically detect this and also read in and show that
configuration. In any case these configurations will be read-only, because it is the distribution's
job to handle updating these settings and the module should not interfere with their internal magic.
Up to five additional preset configurations can be shown in addition to the ten
that are self-definable. These configurations will have the name Vendor x
to distinguish them from the others.
The TDE Control Center can even automatically set your card up whenever you start the module.
Since establishing (or bringing down) a network connection is a security sensitive operation,
any changes to the configuration can only be done by root
.
The configurations are split up in three parts:
general configuration settings (like the network name)
encryption settings
power saving settings
The upper part of the control center module consists of one to ten tabs labelled Config 1 through Config 10. Each of these tabs can hold a configuration for your WLAN card. In addition (as explained above) up to five vendor-specific configurations may be visible, labelled Vendor 1 through Vendor 5.
The most important settings are always visible, the cryptography and power management
options are only shown when activated. The perhaps most important element in each
configuration tab is the fieldNetwork name. Here you can specify
which network you would like to log into. You can either specify the name of your network
directly, or you can try a scan on all available networks by setting the network name to
any
.
In addition to the network name, you have to specify the type of network to log into. That's the purpose of the button groupOperation mode. The optionManaged means that the network consists of designated base stations, so-called “access points” or sometimes “residential gateways”. This is the most common operation mode for company networks. The second option,Ad-hoc means that your network is just a direct connection between computers, without access points. The three other options (Repeater, Master and Secondary) are only very seldomly used. If you want to use them, please be aware that these settings are simply passed to the iwconfig program and have not been tested extensively. In case something doesnt work as expected, you are welcome to send a bug report.
You can optionally set the connection speed for your connection. The setting auto should do for most uses, since the card will determine the appropriate speed itself. However, if you find that the speed changes every few seconds, for example when you have a weak connection, you can set the speed manually.
Below these configuration items you will find a field namedExecute script on
connect:. Here you can enter the name of a script to execute after setting up
the network connection. It will be
executed whenever you hit the Activate configuration button and,
optionally, automatically when you start the Control Center module. The script will have
root
rights. This may lead to problems
if you want to start an X application in the script and the X server belongs to someone
else than root. You can make such scripts work correctly if you execute the X application
via
tdesu
. Or, you can instruct your X server to also allow connections coming from
root. You can do this with the xhost program.-u
USERNAME
-c
COMMAND
The checkbox Use encryption determines whether or not encryption shall be activated. If it is checked, a button labelled becomes available which allows you to configure the details of encryption. After pushing the button, you are presented the following settings in a new dialog:
You can define up to four secret keys for each configuration; in this field you can set which one you want to use to send encrypted packets. The card can always receive packets that are encrypted with any of the keys.
You can achieve asymetrical encryption (different keys for sending and receiving) if you configure your access point to send packets with a different key than the card. Just make sure that the partner station has the required key in any one of its key slots.
When encryption is activated, there are two ways to deal with incoming non-encrypted packets: discard or allow. When you set your card for Open, the card will also listen to non-encrypted packets. Restricted will only allow encrypted network packets, any other packets are discarded.
This box lets you specify the secret keys to use for cryptography. To protect your passwords, only asterisks will be shown when you enter a password. The TDE Control Center module will automatically try to guess whether you want to set an encryption string or a hexadecimal number by checking the input length: string keys are usually 5 or 13 characters long (for 64- or 128-Bit key lengths) whereas hex values are 10 or 26 characters long (please do not put a “0x” in front of hex keys).
Be aware that the built-in cryptography support (named WEP for Wired Equivalent Privacy) is not very safe at all. See the section called “Security considerations on WEP cryptography” for details.
The last configuration element that remains to be described is the power management. When checking the box Enable Power Management a button for the configuration of the setting will become active. After clicking this button, a new dialog will open and you will be presented some options that can help you save energy. The first two input fields named Sleep timeout and Wakeup period describe the periodicity of network online times for your wireless LAN card. The card will turn the radio antenna off for the time period (in seconds) specified in Sleep timeout. Afterwards it will be active for Wakeup period and will in that time establish the network connection and send/receive packets that queued up during the sleep time. If no network connection is found, it will go to sleep again immediately and the cycle begins again. The box named Receive packets below lets you specify which packets the card should listen to when awaken. You can either select Unicast only (which will only let your card listen to packets sent specifically to your card), Multi/Broadcast only (will only listen to packets sent to multiple machines and discard packets directed to your card) or Both. Most people should select the default value Both.
If you wish, you can make KWiFiManager initialize your wireless LAN card whenever you start the TDE Control Center module. To do so, check the box Load preset configuration on startup and select the configuration you want to use in the listbox below. If you want to set the card to these settings at once, push the button Activate configuration.
KWiFiManager needs to know the interface name of your wireless LAN card to
apply any settings. You can either enter the information (for example,
eth1
orwlan0
) manually in the input field
on the right-hand side ofSettings apply to interface:, or let KWiFiManager
auto-detect the interface. To do so, push the button. This will perform a scan on all interfaces listed in /proc/net/dev
to find your card. The result of the scan
will show up in the input field beside the button. If the field remains empty, no card was
found. Please note that KWiFiManager uses the wireless extensions to detect cards.
If you use a card controlled by the wlan-ng package, KWiFiManager only shows correct
results if your driver has a compatibility layer for the wireless extensions
built-in. In the case that there are multiple wireless LAN cards present on the system,
scanning stops after the first card found. So, if you want to apply the settings to a different
card than the one that was detected during the scan, you need to enter its interface name
by hand.
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