Re: Proposed: gnome-network

[Germán Poó Caamaño <gpoo ubiobio cl>]

El lun, 05-01-2004 a las 14:45, Ulrich Neumann escribió:
> [...]
> >gnome-netinfo
> > -------------
> >
> >A frontend for various command line utilities like ifconfig, ping,
> >finger, traceroute etc.
> >
> >+ This really strikes me as a bit of a "geek tool" rather than 
> >something that belongs in the desktop release. Its a pretty
> >nice interface to these tools, but its not really any more
> >intuitive that using the command line versions. Only someone
> >with a pretty good knowledge of how networks work wouldn't
> >be scared off by this.
> There are many people out there coming from windows these days
> and they are familiar with NetDemon or NetScan Tools. They love
> this tool because they want something "point and click" instead of
> the console. I think we should have the not so very skilled network
> administrator in mind if we speak about this tool. I know lots of
> customers who can "use" graphical tools to analyze IP stuff but they
> don't want to use a console for these tasks.

Also, this tool could be useful to give information to a sysadmin 
(to get support)

> >+ Portability concerns: because most of this uses the output from
> >command line tools, there'll probably be a lot of work getting
> >it to work on other platforms. Even on linux you have the worry
> >that the format of the command line tool output possibly changing.
> I agree that in the future the information should come from real API's

"Real" API for traceroute/tcptraceroute and ping was discarded 
because these utilities needs RAW sockets, furthermore, be a 
SUID application.

This kind of tools are too basic to get changes so easy in the 
output.  There have been more changes in /proc/acpi interface 
that breaks the applet than changes in output of network tools.

The cases of finger and whois, it doesn't apply, because the
output is shown as is (in a similar way as the Network 
Information from MacOSX).

I agree that a DNS query can be changed, and it should be 
changed by the libgnetwork API as soon as possible.

NIC information is mostly get by API calls, however not
all the primitives exists in all OS (for instance, 
wireless information, connection speed, link state, etc.).

-- 
Germán Poó Caamaño
mailto:gpoo ubiobio cl
http://www.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/