Re: 2 questions...

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 18:15 -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
> I think something like this would work.. But how would one configure the
> "available" or "preferred" networks in the nobody context?  Provided there is
> some way for a user to push this list of networks/keys into the nobody context
> I have no objection to it working this way.  It's effectively what I wanted,
> although I was thinking it would be done by NM itself.
> 
> My personal preference is still to have NM store the data in a root-only context
> and NM-applet can pass the preferred list to NM.. That way NM can still make
> decisions based on preferred networks without the applet.  Perhaps user can
> choose whether to tell NM to save the info in the global context or save it in
> the user context?

Part of the design of NetworkManager is not having choices about where
or how things are stored.  NM just does that work and people don't have
to think about the context their passwords are stored in.  It's actually
the more secure method overall, since most people don't understand
security at all they tend to make mistakes like entering their passwords
for Trojan horses.  To avoid this we don't give them any choices when it
comes to security.  Now this doesn't mean that there isn't room for some
kind of NetworkManagerAdmin thing that allows _you_ to do crazy stuff,
but it would take some work to design and implement that first.

> Honestly...  Am I really the only person here that considers laptops effectively
> single-user?  It really sounds like you're architecting for a multi-user laptop
> and leaving the single-user laptops in a lurch, having to jump through a bunch
> of hoops..  Isn't the network generally a system resource, not a user
> resource?

I agree that it would be nice to have a switch that let my OS know that
it's a single user machine and I wouldn't have to bother with the
attributes of multi-user machines.  I've pushed for some kind of a
system service that would store system settings and information like
this.  However until that happens I think we have a pretty good
solution.

~ Bryan