Re: VPN API

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 23:51 +0100, Denis Leroy wrote:
> Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 15:03 -0600, Casey Harkins wrote:
> >> I understand that the VPN API is currently in flux, but am looking for 
> >> any documentation on the current API or the direction the API is going. 
> >> (Or is this all just locked up in someone's head).
> >>
> >> NetworkManager-openvpn on Fedora 8 is broken. I'm happy to try to whip 
> >> it into shape, but have no familiarity with how all of the 
> >> NetworkManager pieces fit together, especially how NetworkManager calls 
> >> out to the VPN plugins.
> >>
> >> Are either the vpnc or pptp plugins being kept up to date with API 
> >> changes? If so, at least I have known working code to work from.
> > 
> > vpnc is; and upstream openvpn has already been fixed up to conform to
> > the new API bits.  Nobody's been around to test it yet.  What we
> > probably should do is to build what's upstream for Fedora, push it out
> > (it can't possibly be _less_ broken than whats in F8 already) and wait
> > for the bug reports.
> 
> Still the F-8 vpnc has a number of protocol-related issues, such as 
> login failures not being reported. It throws a D-bus "failure" signal 
> that nobody catches (which seems redundant with the state_change 
> signals). Or the "lock" icon sometimes not showing up when it's supposed 
> to be. I was looking into that code recently, but didn't really know how 
> the pieces were meant to fit together. Any guidance would be helpful, so 
> I can work on a patch.

I had started to clean that up but needed to ensure that NM sent the
right VPN status reason in the right places.  I think there are 1 or 2
cases where the reason code isn't appropriate to allow clients to just
mirror the reason code as the notification to the user.  Basically, in
applet.c's show_vpn_state() function, there should be a switch statement
or something for the VPN state, and then if the state is
NM_VPN_CONNECTION_STATE_FAILED it should translate the reason code as
appropriate and display the notification to the user as to why the
connection failed.

Dan