Network Reconnect

About

Network Reconnect is a utility designed to make managing wired and wireless network connections easy. It is a set of scripts for Linux operating systems that uses certain built-in technologies to provide basic network connections. The purpose of this is to eliminate overhead present in other utilities and to add extra features that will benefit a vast number of users.

Features

We currently support a wide range of useful and easy-to-use features that are built right into network-reconnect, with even more cool functionality on the way. Here is a quick breakdown of the most notable features we offer:

• Two ways to use: GUI and CLI
• Management of basic wired and wirelss connections
• Simple and advanced report generation
• Automatic checking and refreshing of all connections
• Instant-on connection upon wakeup and bootup
• Extensive backend independent of interfaces

History

I first created network-reconnect when my WiFi card was having issues with dropouts and I needed to refresh the connection every time the link went dead. Eventually, I realized that network-reconnect needed to have some sort of interface so I could connect to different networks. The program soon evolved into what you see today. I've decided to share network-reconnect because:

• many mainstream computers have unreliable network interfaces that could use a simple reconnect script
• other network connection utilities for Linux/UNIX have a lot of unnecessary overhead

Compatibility

You might have noticed that we only mentioned Linux in our introduction above. No Windows or Mac? Why, that's insane!

Well, yes, while not supporting the two most popular desktop operating systems might seem a bit foolish, network-reconnect is currently only supported on the Linux platform. That's because our program is written entirely in Shell and depends on GNU/Linux userspace utilities that are hard to port to other platforms. If you are really itching to try out network-reconnect, you could attempt to install Mac equivalents of the required software and force-run our scripts; similarly, you could try running network-reconnect in a Cygwin environment under Windows. But if you really want to see network-reconnect grow and officially support other platforms, we strongly encourage you to contribute.

For now, you can download a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu to test out network-reconnect.

Installation

So you've downloaded one of our master packages. What next? Follow the instructions below on pretty much any Linux distribution and you'll be set up within minutes.

1. Open the network-reconnect-master.zip or network-reconnect-master.tar.gz file you downloaded in an archive manager. This should happen by double-clicking on the file.
2. In the window that opens, navigate to the "Extract" button and click on it. Be sure to remember the location where you extracted the package.
3. Start a terminal. In Ubuntu, for example, this can be done by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T.
4. In the terminal, change the working directory to where you extracted the archive. If you extracted to your Desktop, you would type cd ~/Desktop.
5. Launch the network-reconnect installer by using the commands sudo chmod a+x install.sh and then ./install.sh

Unless you get any red error messages, you're all done! You can delete the network-reconnect archives and get started with the program.

Getting Started

Really, network-reconnect is quite simple. Basic usage depends solely on the type of network you're trying to connect to:

• Wired (Ethernet)
• Wireless (WiFi)

For wired networks, make sure that you have an active Ethernet cable plugged into your computer, then follow these instructions:

1. Start "Network Reconnect" from your desktop launcher or type network-reconnect-gui in a terminal.
2. In the window that opens, select the button for "Connect to a Network" and click "OK".
3. After a new dialog appears, select the button for "Ethernet" and click "OK". Unless you get any errors, you're ready to use the Internet!

If you want to connect to a wireless network, we have a few things to say beforehand. First of all, make sure that your computer has some sort of WiFi adapter (either through a USB dongle or internally). But please note that, unfortunately, network-reconnect is unable to activate WPA-secured networks at this time. That said, you can connect to any unsecured or WEP network by following these quick steps:

1. Start "Network Reconnect" from your desktop launcher or type network-reconnect-gui in a terminal.
2. In the window that opens, select the button for "Connect to a Network" and click "OK".
3. After a new dialog appears, select the button for "WiFi" and click "OK".
4. A list of available networks should appear. If the list is blank, please see here. In the box under the list, retype the exact name of the network you want to connect to and click "OK". Now you're ready to use the Internet!

More Information

This software utility is currently in active development, and we do not recommend that you use it in real-world production scenarios. Right now, there are plenty of issues, so please feel free to contribute if you want to help us out!

If you want to know more about how to install and use network-reconnect, please see our wiki.