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I am having with the NetworkManger Applet 0.8.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 AMD64. It (or NetworkManager or my wireless driver) seem to crash occasionally, which means I lose all network connectivity. How can I debug NetworkManager and the applet on startup and login? I want to know what is causing the problem so that I can fix it or file a bug report.

Edit: This page provides some good details about debugging the NetworkManager daemon, but I'm still having trouble with the applet (e.g. the applet crashes, I lose my connection, I restart NetworkManager and use commandline utilities, regain my connection, but no applet comes back).

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2 Answers

Network-Manager is started from /etc/init.d, as a short look reveals:

ls /etc/init.d/netw*

So you first can stop it:

sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager stop

I don't know how you like to debug it, with strace?

from man NetworkManager

              terminal in addition to syslog.

       pinpoint the source of connection issues.

So instead of strace and a simple restart, you should perhaps first stop the daemon, and then start with the above option in a console, so you can view live what's going on.

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strace would be fine, or just enabling any debugging output from network-manager and redirecting it to a file. Anything that save any debugging output to a file for inspection later would work. –  Tyler K. Mar 22 '11 at 5:22
So sudo strace /etc/init.d/network-manager restart should help you. Did you do so, or are you waiting for more advice? –  user unknown Mar 25 '11 at 7:51
I would like to log ALL debugging output, from when NetworkManager starts to when and if it crashes. I want the output written to a file (permissions don't matter, I'm the only user) that can searched later. –  Tyler K. Mar 25 '11 at 18:40
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search the logfiles:

dmesg | tail 

shortly after an incident, maybe with tail -n 40, see man tail

grep -i net /var/log/*log

if you find something interesting:

less /var/log/XY.log

If you know your wlan module name, grep for that.

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