Re: NM using Option card

[Stefan Seyfried <seife suse de>]

On Fri, Feb 08, 2008 at 09:54:28AM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> We've been talking to the VMC developers, who have added a D-Bus
> interface to VMC.  You're right, it's pointless to have many projects
> duplicate the same quirks and workarounds for cards, and using some
> existing tool is the way to go.  Since VMC is adding the D-Bus
> interface, Tambet and I thought that using VMC like we currently use
> wpa_supplicant would be a good option.

Did you ever look at VMC? IMHO it is much too heavyweight to be a backend
for a system daemon like NM. And it supported almost no hardware the last
time i looked (a few weeks ago).

> > The 10.64.64.64 default peer address is also no problem - the network just
> > does not return a peer address, so pppd uses this default. It does not matter,
> > as long as your default route points to the ppp interface, it just works.
> > At least for me, with a quite some hardware and providers that have tested.
> 
> Not really; I needed a valid peer address for Sprint here in the US
> otherwise my packets would go nowhere.  Previously, the NM
> implementation would just assign the local address as the peer address,
> and that simply didn't work.  I can't imagine how assigning the random
> 10.64.64.6x address would work any better?

If the peer does not supply a peer address it will basically go like

    route add default dev ppp0

As long as the other end takes all traffic and routes it, you don't
need a default gateway set up on your machine.

root susi:~# ifconfig modemB
modemB    Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol
          inet addr:10.129.77.52  P-t-P:10.64.64.64  Mask:255.255.255.255
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:7 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3
          RX bytes:58 (58.0 b)  TX bytes:327 (327.0 b)

root susi:~# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.64.64.64     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 modemB
127.0.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 lo
0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         0.0.0.0         U     0      0        0 modemB

and it works just fine. (Yes, ifconfig and route are lame and real men use ip
for that today... :-)

This does not mean that this will work for all configurations, but for those
i encountered here in europe, it worked just fine.
-- 
Stefan Seyfried
R&D Team Mobile Devices            |              "Any ideas, John?"
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nürnberg | "Well, surrounding them's out." 

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