Comment 7 for bug 5364

My home wireless network uses static ip addresses (to do port forwarding through my wireless router, DHCP must be turned off).

So I've been trying to use the System -> Administration -> Networking dialog to switch between a "home" configuration and a "NetworkManager" configuration.

The problem with the NetworkManager side of this method is that there is no easy way (as far as I can tell) to let NetworkManager know that I've switched the networking configuration with gnome-system-tools. What I've been doing lately is to switch to 'NetworkManager' mode using System -> Administration -> Networking, then doing

 $ sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

This reloads NetworkManager so it realizes that /etc/networking/interfaces no longer configures the wireless card(s). But now nm-applet hangs. So I do

 $ killall nm-applet
 $ nm-applet --sm-disable

Now I'm back in business.

But, this is a lousy solution!!
 - There needs to be a way to signal NetworkManager that the network configuration has changes (is there anything better than /etc/init.d/dbus restart?)
 - nm-applet should be able to survive this reconfiguration (maybe if NetworkManger doesn't need to be restarted, then all will be OK).

There are other problems with the solution, also, which are more the fault of the gnome-system-tools networking tool.
 - switching the configuration should allow a hook script so I can adjust postfix configuration, cups configuration, etc... for the environment I'm it.
 - the networking tool seems pretty broken to me. The only way I can reliably use it is to hand-edit the xml configuration file in /etc/gnome-system-tools/networking because if I chage anything about a configuration in the GUI it is never saved. Also, there is no way to delete an obsolete configuration via the GUI. Or am I the only person for which System -> Administration -> Networking is broken???