Re: NM do not see any network

["Darren Albers" <dalbers gmail com>]

On 12/8/06, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-12-07 at 21:57 -0500, Darren Albers wrote:
> > dispatch_more_events: Seems to add pre-up and post-down events to
> > dispatcher.d  Wasn't this always an option?  Maybe what someone asked
> > earlier about running a command before an interface is activated is
> > possible with dispatcher.d with this patch?
>
> Interesting; these events are quite a bit less interesting than it may
> seem.  'pre-up' would be time-bounded, since NM certainly doesn't call
> out to synchronous, blocking scripts when it brings up a connection, nor
> should it.  So whatever script gets called here for pre-up will have to
> be pretty fast, because NM isn't going to wait for it before continuing.
> This is quite racy and therefore wrong.
>
> I'm not sure what "post-down" means; there's already the disconnected
> event from the dispatcher which executes scripts when the connection is
> terminated.

I see what this does (whether this is smart or not is beyond me...),
the package adds a script to dispatcher that users these two new
events to call the general networking configuration items that are
required by Ubuntu.  For example pre-up is used to trigger a script
that calls the standard networking scripts for Debian/Ubuntu:
The first sets some wireless options using the wireless tools and the
second starts wpa_supplicant.   The postdown does the opposite and
shutsdown wpa_supplicant and then sets all the wireless configuration
options to their defaults again.

I think this is done so that people can set some specific items in
/etc/network/interfaces such as speed, channel etc.. but as long as
they keep the interface set to use DHCP Network Manager will continue
to manage it.

Could this be a potential problem for Network Manager if things like
the rate are set there?

> > disabled_devices: This tells NM not to touch devices managed in
> > /etc/network/interfaces
>
> Right; everybody does this and that's fine; but Ubuntu seems to do it
> automatically without telling users what's going on.  SUSE has a config
> option in YAST, and half the questions we get here are about this
> problem in Ubuntu, because people don't realize that touching something
> in a config tool there turns something else off in NM.

I agree and I wonder if until the recent announcement that they really
wanted people to use NetworkManager?   Their point was probably that
rewriting the gnome-network-panel to inform the users of this was too
much work to make it by release or that there was nobody who wanted to
take it on.


> > hostap-supplicant-driver: adds a workaround for the hostap driver
>
> What does this one do?

If it detects any of the following kernel_drivers hostap_pci,
hostap_cs, and hostap_plx it passes hostap to wpa_supplicant.

> > I saw in the release notes for Feisty beta (I forgot the catchy code
>
> Feisty Fawn Herd 1 :)
>
> > name they used) that NM might be the default network management
> > utility for Feisty so I think the testing period there will hopefully
> > shake out any issues with their packages and maybe (hopefully?) will
> > get some patches sent upstream.
>
> Hmm, I thought Ubuntu was still punting NM-by-default since it doesn't
> cover a bunch of use-cases like static IP.  That's fine, Fedora doesn't
> turn it on by default either for that same reason.  SUSE's out in front
> a bit here, which actually helps everyone out by exposing issues and
> problems.

Here is the spec they plan on implementing:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/network-roaming
It seems very redundant to 0.7 which I thought would be out with
plenty of time for Feisty April release date...  Is 0.7 still on track
for Jan?

On a side note I used Fedora for the first time on a Mac Mini my wife
gave me for my birthday (I really tried to like MAC OS but little
things kept annoying me about it) and I was impressed.   It shows a
lot of polish and there were some things that I really liked about it
and it will probably stay since my needs on that system are a lot less
than on my laptop so I won't need to learn all the nuances of another
distro.