Ubtuntu 9.10 Wireless Device Not Managed

Two days ago, my internet was out for about 16 hours. During that time, I thought I’d install those downloaded updates and restart. Something must have changed in my system configuration when those updates installed, because no matter what, I couldn’t access my server via the network.

After resorting to physically moving to the poor Ubuntu computer, I checked to see if it had a connection, and to my surprise, it did not. The little networking icon in the corner, under wireless, declared, device not managed!

Doing some research into this mysterious problem, I came across a forum post I thought that might help. It said to replace any junky old contents of the /etc/network/interfaces file with new fresh one.

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0

#iface eth1 inet dhcp
#auto eth1

I figured since I remembered editing that not too long before I restart (actually, a couple weeks), it might be worth a try. After restarting again, there was no difference in connectivity. Something strange is going on, right?

Another research found solution lead me to change the network manager to mange the wireless connection, I guess. (I’m not really sure what it does, other than, obviously, manage the network connections.) So I changed /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf.

# original, before change
[ifupdown]
managed=false

# now after change
[ifupdown]
managed=true

That’s neat. Plus, you learn new things every day (let’s see this in Windows too), I restarted my networking connection right there in the console with, sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart and sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart. One of those commands will make Ubuntu tell you that it’s a service and not a script.

A few seconds later, my wireless network appeared to be connected and the, device not managed notice went away as if it had never been there.

If you’re wondering, though: you’re located on my blog, which happens to be a sub-domain of ifupdown, the same names as the networking packages for Linux. Coincidence? I think not!