Re: Multiple questions about NM 0.7 on Debian

["Nicolas Girard" <ngirard gmail com>]

Dan,

Thanks much for your answers. Response inline.

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 11:09 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 13:44 -0400, Nicolas GIRARD wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm testing NM 0.7 on a Debian based system with multiple NICs (server
>> configuration w/o X11). After much tinkering and reading the ML
>> archive, I must admit that I'm struggling to get things up and
>> running. In particular, I have a few questions:
>>
>> (1) Is NM meant to be used without a D-Bus session bus, i.e using the
>> system bus instead ? For some reasons,
>> my ini-type files are getting ignored so I tried using nm-connection-
>> editor to spit out something of interest as described here [1] but it
>> is complaining about not being able to hook up on the session bus
>> (which does not exist since I don't have x-window on the machine)
>
> Yes, NM doesn't use the session bus at all.

OK. Excellent.

I guess  nm-connection-editor is using the session bus though because
it complains about not being able to hook up on the session bus. I'm
forwarding display over ssh so it could be the issue. The reason why I
tried nm-connection-editor was that my keyfile connections in
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections are ignored for some reason. If
I start /usr/sbin/nm-system-settings manually with the keyfile plugin,
it ignore my keyfile connections and set all my NICs to Auto and dhcp

>
>> (2) I used to rely on custom dhclient-exit-hooks (from dhcp3) to set
>> up some policy routing. As I understand it, NM is relying nm-dhcp-
>> client.action instead of calling dhclient. Is there a way of telling
>> to call custom scripts after dhcping an interface ?
>
> If you have basic routing needs, you can add routes (or override the
> automatically determined ones from DHCP or VPN) in the connection
> editor.  Otherwise, you can add a dispatcher script to do the same thing
> if you really want to.  Google around for them, the format is the same
> in 0.7 though with 0.7 you get both the IPv4 and DHCPv4 configs added to
> the scripts environment.

It is complex routing with custom scripts calling 'ip' custom rules. I
will look into the dispatcher scripts.

>
>> (3) I would like my resolv.conf to stay unmodified as I bring
>> interface up and down. What is the best way to proceed ?
>
> Why is that?  NM needs to merge information from various sources into
> your resolv.conf, plus that configuration certainly won't be valid once
> the interface is down.  You can add your own custom search domains and
> DNS servers for each connection if you like though.  Could you describe
> your use-case a bit more here?

My use case is a bit unconventional and I have been following the
debate about resolv.conf with avidity.  I cannot really go into the
details of what we are doing but suffice to say that we have some sort
of SOCKS tunneling system where all the different NICs participate. It
is important that resolv.conf remains unmodified. I am therefore
voting for a high-level switch on turn on and off the propagation of
resolv' information and associated modifications of the resolv.conf.

Again, thank you for your time.

Nicolas