Ubuntu 9.04 “Wired Network – device not managed”

by Craig Mayhew on Jun.13, 2009, under Guides/Fixes, Linux/Ubuntu

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 I’ve found the network manager GUI to be far superior to the previous version I was using in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Unfortunately when I was using Ubuntu 8.04 I made some custom alterations to my network setup in the “/etc/network/interfaces” file. The Network Manager in 9.04 wasn’t keen on this and so refused to manage it, instead it displayed the message “Wired Network – device not managed”.

As a work around I commented out all of my changes by placing a # at the beginning of each line in my interfaces file:

Open the interfaces file in an editor:

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

This is an example of how my file looked before I modified it. Yours will be different:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth2 inet static
address 192.168.0.44
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.1
auto eth2

And here’s the same file again, but I’ve added #’s at the beginning of each line so that they are ignored:

#auto lo
#iface lo inet loopback
#iface eth2 inet static
#address 192.168.0.44
#netmask 255.255.255.0
#gateway 192.168.0.1
#auto eth2

In order for the changes to take effect, we need to restart the network manager and the applet by running each of these in the command line:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

And now restart the network manager applet:

pkill nm-applet
nm-applet

You should now be able to manage the network connection from within the network manager applet.

:,

12 Comments for this entry

  • RockU

    Thank you.It’s very useful.

  • snake

    I have same message “Wired Network – device not managed”, and I can’t manage the network connections.

    I’ll try something else.

  • Bondo

    Yes, this also did not work for me. This isn’t really much of a fix, anyway.

  • Craig Mayhew

    Hi Snake, Bondo,

    Try changing [ifupdown] managed=false to true in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

  • Codemaster Snake

    Hey!

    Thanks for sharing the info… I had this problem and solved it…

    cheers!

  • kjo

    This worked for me. I wonder if I go back now and uncomment if it will still work.

    Note to self:::don’t try wicd because of Network Manager problems and then try to switch back when wicd sucks.

  • Samurai

    It worked for me. But had to restart my pc for the settings to take effect. Restarting the network service didn’t do the job. Thanks buddy..

  • Maja

    Thank you! This solution worked for me to (8.04LTS –> 9.04)! Found this post on google, I love finding troubleshooters in old blog posts..

  • Martin

    Had the same problem but solved it by changing [ifupdown] managed=false to true in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

  • Will

    Thank you. It works!
    I have been bothered by the question for a long time. After reading your article, I was eagle to try it. It really works on my Ubuntu 9.10. Thanks again!

  • John

    Thank you so much for this workaround! I’d been unable to connect to anything but my wireless network for the past year or so. This speeds things up tremendously.

  • enos76

    Will they ever make the interfaces file and the nm-applet work in harmony? This is ridiculous.

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