Re: Stopping NetworkManager without taking the interface down.

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2008-02-02 at 15:15 +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> as NetworkManager (especially the 0.7 version) tries to be more than
> just a network configuration for the laptop, but also desktops and
> servers, there is one issue, that's currently suboptimal imho.
> That is, that NM always deconfigures the network interface when it is
> stopped. This is especially unfortunate, when you remotely administer
> machines and you have to restart NetworkManager (e.g. after installing a
> security update of NM. Rebooting is not ideal for servers...).

Right, but the NM startup is the part that's going to kill you here...

> That's why I think, it's an important feature for NetworkManager, to
> provide the option to not deconfigure a network interface on stop and
> ideally, on startup, recognize and pickup an already existing
> connection, without the need to reconfigure the device.
> The latter might be very hard to do for wireless interfaces, but for
> wired interfaces it should be possible (and most servers and
> workstations will have wired connections).

Obviously this isn't something that's easy to do, especially with the
richness of configuration and the number of interfaces.  It's also much
harder to do for anything except wired, and it's probably pretty hard to
do for wired 802.1x-authenticated connections.

> Dan, Tambet, would it be possible to add such functionality to
> NetworkManager?

Yes, but probably not before 0.8 I think.  I believe it would require
quite a bit of coding and architecting to ensure that it's not an
un-manageable hack.

Dan

> Other opionions on this are very welcome.
> 
> Cheers,
> Michael
> 
> 
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