Re: PPP Serial Laplink setting

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2007-12-13 at 22:24 +0530, atul mehrotra wrote:
> Hi ,
> I am trying to use NetworkManager to establish a Serial Laplink using
> PPP between two computers.. For this i tried to hack the code of
> network manager applet & network manager ppp-manager modules. Although
> by doing the modifications in src/NM- ppp-manager.c in function
> create_pppd_cmd_line i am able to do the cmd option which i want from
> my ppp client. But my main issue is how to actually make the network
> manager applet do the kind of initializations which we are doing in
> new_auto_connection() in applet.c for wireless and GSM devices.
> I saw that GSM_DEVICE specific code over there but nothing specific to
> make ppp connection. But i dont want to do GSM related stuff so as a
> hack i modified the code of WIRELESS option & called
> new_auto_gsm_setting there instead of wireless setting function call &
> also commented out gsm related sttings & just tried to do serial
> setting & ppp settings . But my problem is that the control flow is
> not reaching to that particular function. Also i tried to debug
> nm-applet through gdb but it is getting stuck in gtk_main() in main.c.
>  Can anyone Help me out that how to use network manager for just
> configuring PPP connection on serial port ??

There's two options here:

One option might be to extend the NMSerialDevice class to do PPP dialing
too.  Subclasses (like GSMDevice) would of course be free to override
those bits with their own behavior like they already do.  Then you teach
the applet about serial devices, although platform serial ports should
_not_ be shown in the NM applet menu simply because they are not PNP and
always show up even if they aren't present on x86 hardware.  USB serial
devices probably should show up automatically.

The second option might be to create a new NMSerialDevice subclass
called NMDirectSerialDevice.  The applet bits would be almost entirely
the same.

For either option, you'll need to modify the code in nm-hal-manager.c to
detect the device type and create the device object for the serial port.

Dan