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I was having problems connecting to the internet either by wireless or wired connection. I keep getting an icon in the systray that has a tooltip that says "unmanaged" and when I click on it I get a "Network management disabled".

I googled and found the command:

sudo dhclient eth0

Which finally enabled my network and I have net. The problem is I still get the icon with the some word "unmanaged"

Can anyone help me out? I just want to know what is happening and why did I had to go to the command line to enable my network.

I had to put the computer in sleep mode and then it wouldn't wake up, so I rebooted the machine. The network manager problems started again, this time the file mentioned by maco had the value set to true and it still wouldn't work.

Anyone know how I can make this permanently work? I did a

sudo init 0

And when I booted the machine at a later time I had the network manager enabled. Have no clue why.

2

7 Answers 7

35

I find this happens after a bad shutdown. Just change

managed=false

to

managed=true

in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf


Note: In newer versions of Ubuntu, the file is at /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf

Then restart service

service network-manager restart
7
  • Thanks so much!!! I edited the file, rebooted and it worked great :) Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!
    – AntonioCS
    Aug 23, 2010 at 16:16
  • 3
    maco's solution now requires editing of /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf. The setting is still the same.
    – Kenny
    May 16, 2012 at 2:30
  • 1
    This solution doesn't work for me in 16.10. Apr 12, 2017 at 6:59
  • 1
    worked for me 18.04
    – Sudheera
    May 11, 2018 at 7:38
  • 2
    Instead of rebooting, service network-manager restart will also work. Nov 25, 2018 at 21:01
15

This worked for Ubuntu 17.04

sudo touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-globally-managed-devices.conf
sudo service network-manager restart
3
  • Oh jeez this had been plaguing an installation of Bionic I did on ZFS using debootstrap for hours, I was beginning to think nothing would ever work. THANK YOU!!! Apr 23, 2018 at 10:43
  • worked also on Ubuntu 18.04 in which the NetworkManager suddenly stopped. Sep 18, 2018 at 18:13
  • 1
    Thanks, worked for me. Ubuntu 20.04. Probably bad Software Updater package caused no wired connection...
    – Tarasovych
    Sep 22, 2020 at 20:03
9

I've just upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10. After that, this problem started to happen to me. In my case, I've solved it following the suggestion given in Ubuntu's launchpad:

touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-globally-managed-devices.conf

This creates an empty file.

3
  • 1
    I had the same problem and only this helped me!
    – user307975
    Apr 13, 2017 at 18:46
  • Thanks, this helped me finally fix this problem after an upgrade to 17.04. Apr 16, 2017 at 9:34
  • Thanks, this was the only solution that worked for me in 18.04
    – adamgy
    Jul 6, 2020 at 21:41
8

You should look at the contents of the file /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state. It should look something like this:

[main]
NetworkingEnabled=true
WirelessEnabled=true
WWANEnabled=true

Change any from 'false' to 'true' to re-enable networking. It may work better if you first stop NetworkManager:

sudo stop network-manager

And start it again once done. Or reboot :)

In any case, this is frequent when a suspended system fails to wake up. It should be fixed in Maverick.

2
  • +1 Massive help for me... Thx. Countless hours fiddling with network settings until I decided to hit the stack exchange. Silly me.
    – Russ
    Dec 19, 2010 at 2:44
  • This! I've been stuck on this all day! Thanks!
    – assafmo
    Dec 1, 2017 at 13:48
7

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to 16.10. I have 3 network cards (all configured) and no Wifi. All 3 cards were disabled, all options on the Network Manager menu were greyed out, so clicking them does nothing. I fixed it by combining two of the solutions above:

Edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and change:

managed=false

to

managed=true

Restarted network-manager:

sudo service network-manager restart

No change. Then I tried:

touch /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-globally-managed-devices.conf
sudo service network-manager restart

All three network cards came back on-line.

2
  • the fix is weird, and the post above is not exactly correct.
    – rob grune
    Apr 21, 2017 at 5:09
  • After a lot of research this was the only one that worked for me. Thanks!
    – six2dez
    May 30, 2019 at 12:10
0

Try right-clicking the NetworkManager icon and enabling the network from that menu.

1
  • 1
    It doesn't work. I just get a "Network management disabled"
    – AntonioCS
    Aug 24, 2010 at 8:41
0

I installed ubuntu-gnome-desktop to ubuntu server 14.04.4 and the file was not nm-system-settings.conf, but NetworkManager.conf

As in sudo gedit etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf I could not find nm-system-settings.conf Perhaps it is not installed (nm-system-settings) as I do not see it on the gnome Panel bar in the gnome classic view desktop. Need to get the Network going to do updates and install gnome-session-flashback to get the Gnome-Flashback (Metacity) on 14.04.4 LTS, my Favorite desktop!

I had not checked /var/lib/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.state before reboot but, perhaps it was updated after reboot as it was correct.

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