Re: integration of nonphysical interfaces in NM

[Tomislav Vujec <tvujec redhat com>]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:54:39 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> In the case of VPN, why do other programs _care_?  What good does it do
> to advertise VPN connections to other applications at all?  Most
> applications care about "getting to the internet", which a VPN does for
> you.  In the case of a VPN, routing-table+DNS magic will provide the
> ability to use VPN connections for certain blocks of addresses (both IP
> and DNS) which is completely transparent to the application anyway, even
> without NetworkManager.  The kernel is doing the packet routing here,
> not user applications.

I think some applications might care, e.g. email client. My usage pattern
looks like this:
1) Connect to the Internet
2) If I am in the company LAN, go to step 4
3) connect to the VPN
4) Sync my email
Now NM removes the requirement on doing the step 1 manually. While I would
like to keep the opportunity to run step 3 manually, I would still like to
avoid having to perform step 4 manually, if there is a way for an
application to receive this notice. Imagine evolution plug which would
automatically switch an email account to online / offline, based on the
specific VPN availability.

I think that the NM would be the right place to do this, since it should
operate network interfaces, VPN included.

Tomislav