Re: boot process and networkManager

[Robert Love <rml novell com>]

On Fri, 2006-08-11 at 13:02 -0400, Brent S. Elmer wrote:
> When does networkmanager actually set up the network?  It seems that
> the actual network connection and setup is too late in the boot
> process.  I am running openAFS which starts during the end of the boot
> process.  During the openAFS startup, it checks to make sure that it
> can connect to the afs server.  This works fine when not using
> networkmanager.  However, when using networkmanager, it doesn't appear
> that dns lookup is enabled yet.

This is because NM has launched but presumably not yet obtained a
network connection, and your distro does not block the boot process
until such time.

So AFS (or whatever) starts when there is no IP.

Ideally, apps would not be so dumb.

Instead, we have two choices

	(1) Launch network-related apps via NM's dispatcher.d, not
	    via init.d.
	(2) Stick nm-online in NM's init script, after you launch
	    it.  This will block the initscript until NM obtains
	    a network connection or N seconds elapse (whatever
	    happens first).

I think (1) is ideal, but that requires a bit of work.

	Robert Love