Wicd

Found an application for Linux a while ago but forgot about it until now. Wicd is an alternative to the Network Manager application (which is a piece of crap in my opinion) used by default (I think) in Gnome. Handles connecting to wired and wireless networks and is compatible with the standard Linux networking tools (ifconfig, iwconfig et al) so figuring out what the scripts are doing (coded in python which makes it even better) should be pretty easy.

The really nice thing about it is I can globally set my DNS servers of choice and the dhcp reply doesn’t overwrite them. This means that I can use trusted DNS servers all the time instead of the servers that the network I’m on wants to use.