Re: [ubuntu/debian] monitoring woes of /etc/network/interfaces...

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 22:04 +0100, Daniel J Blueman wrote:
> Network Manager 0.6.6 (in eg Ubuntu 8.04) monitors the
> /etc/network/interfaces for changes and acts upon them as soon as the
> file is modified.
> 
> This can be seen as a good feature in certain ways, but had two
> significant drawbacks I find:
> 
>  - in Linux/unix philosiphy (thus expected usage), editing
> configuration files can be safely done (multiple times) until some
> subsystem is restarted/notified
> 
>  - if you're logged in, and (eg) /home is NFS-mounted, you get a
> consequent system hang
> 
> Is there a strong case for this behaviour, or something else that
> depends on this?

People seem to have quite different opinions about this sort of
behavior.

On the other side, SIGHUP isn't the right solution because it's only
_one_ signal.  In NM we could potentially monitor a few different
things, and we don't want to have to re-read the VPN service .name files
just because somebody sent a SIGHUP becuase they
changed /etc/network/interfaces.

I don't have a particular feeling either way, but I'd like to hear other
people's thoughts on the subject too.

dan