Device not Managed

Continuing with my experience installing Debian Squeeze, I found with another trouble: I couldn't connect trough my WiFi card, and all the information I was given was: "Device not managed".

I did know that it wasn't due of a misconfigured driver, because during the installation Debian downloaded some packages and updates using this interface. So I started to dig in the Debian (and Network Manager) documentation. I found two causes for this message:

1. The file /etc/network/interfaces has a reference to the interface that we're trying to use
   
2. The configuration file for NetworkManager(/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf)
   defines the property:
[ifupdown]
managed=false

This is due to the default configuration in Debian Squeeze, this means that any interface defined in /etc/network/interfaces is not managed, the thing is, if you connected to internet during the installation (packages and/or updates) the interface you used automatically was added to that file.

The solution to this is to modify the configuration:

tepeyolotl@satellite: /$ sudo gedit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager

In this file we rewrite the configuration for the desired interface:

[ifupdown]
managed=true

Now, we must restart the service in order to the changes take place:

tepeyolotl@satellite: /$ sudo service network-manager restart
[sudo] password for tepeyolotl:
Stopping network connection manager: NetworkManager.
Starting network connection manager: NetworkManager.

And now we have connection trough our "unmanaged" interface.