Re: PPP Dial up tool

[Dmitry Koval <koval donapex net>]

On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 17:23, Ross Burton wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-12-29 at 16:14, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> > What is the status of  any Gnome PPP dialup tool?
> 
> gnome-system-tools has a tool to configure network configurations, and
> PPP is one of the available types.  Use that to configure the account
> (g-s-t will be in GNOME 2.6 hopefully) and then use the Modem Lights
> applet to activate the connection.

I'd like to point out some other aspects which this approach do not
addresses:

1. Control of the stage of dialing. That is user cannot see what is now
going on and have no clue on the reason of failure.

2. Modem lights is not giving you simple way to select the connection to
use.

3. All above is applies to VPN connections too. The same set of tools
should deal with both PPP and VPN. But modem-lights doesn't gives you an
easy way to get up a pptpd connection for example.

4. Diversification of these (g-s-t, modem lights) tools seems not good
for me. I think there should be one place where user can create a new
connection, select some connection and then dial out.

5. And finally, following the trend of taking away technical details, we
should avoid all stuff like ppp0, lock-file and so-on.

I'm not sure that my proposition is adequate, but I propose:

Create an additional url for Nautilus like "connections://"
where all the management of connections should take place.
So I think all of the functionality should be implemented as a part
Nautilus.

To address the first issue as far as I see we should use pppd directly
and avoid use of system scripts. I'm not sure is this is a good way,
but doing so we could avoid requiring root password for creating new
connection.

And since one application does all the work we can use notification area
for controlling active connection.

-- 
Dmitry Koval <koval donapex net>