Re: 3G; wireless auth; policies; docs

[rotru br ibm com]

Where is the spec.html file ??
I could not find or generate it.


Thanks

Rodrigo Trujillo

From:	Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
To:	Jens-Michael Hoffmann <J Hoffmann option com>
Cc:	Alexey Dumov <A Dumov option com>, networkmanager mailing list <networkmanager-list gnome org>, Ferenc Sos <F Sos option com>
Date:	07/03/2008 06:19 PM
Subject:	Re: 3G; wireless auth; policies; docs

---

On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 13:14 +0200, Jens-Michael Hoffmann
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> first of all let me thank you for your great work and NetworkManager.

Great to see your interest.  I'd like to ensure that Option cards
work
as well as possible with NetworkManager.

> We are currently evaluating NetworkManager and would like to ask some
> questions:
> 
> What is the status of support for 3G devices?

We have fairly basic support for connecting, disconnecting, setting APN,
PIN/PUK handling, username, password, etc.  Planned support includes
band preference, roaming preference, etc.  I'd like to implement rfkill
as well but we really do need a standard kernel interface for that which
would live in the 'option' driver in the kernel and hook into the WWAN
rfkill functionality in 2.6.26 and later.

> How and where are policies (like choose wired over wireless) implemented?

It's fairly basic right now.  But I'm certainly willing to discuss
more
flexible priority handling

> Is it possible to do connect on demand with NetwokManager?

Not at this time, I need to figure out how that's supposed to work.
ISTR it involves creating a 'fake' network device and having userspace
hooks called whenever something starts sending out traffic or bringing
the device up, but I actually have no idea.  Definitely something
I want
to support though.

> How is the wireless authentication stuff (WEP/WPA/WPA2) handled?
> Are there callbacks to get the keys or any other mechanism?

Yes.  When NM (or the user) wishes to connect to a wireless network
and
does not have the required authentication secrets for that network, it
will ask the daemon that provides that connection.  This is either
the
system settings daemon (nm-system-settings) or the applet running in the
user's session (nm-applet or knetworkmanager).  If the settings deamon
does not have the secrets required, it will ask the user for them.

> Is there any kind of documentation apart from the generated spec.html?
> We are especially looking for developer documentation.

At this time the documentation consists of the generated spec.html,
which is really only useful if you are intending to write your own
front-end to NetworkManager (talking over D-Bus of course).  You could
also use libnm-glib which provides an object-oriented wrapper around the
dbus interface.

I will be adding doxygen/gtkdoc a bit later this summer to libnm-util
and libnm-glib, but in the mean time, both Tambet and I would be quite
happy to answer any questions you might have.

The D-Bus and libnm-glib APIs are not _quite_ final yet, but they are
pretty darn close and I don't expect them to change much.  The one
change I will be making quite soon is using IPv4 prefixes instead of
IPv4 netmasks through out the API and the UI.

Dan

> 
> Best regards
> 
> Jens-Michael Hoffmann
> _______________________________________________
> NetworkManager-list mailing list
> NetworkManager-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list

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