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

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 23:32 +0200, Alexander Sack wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 10:04:11PM +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?
> 
> This is an ubuntu specific patch. The reason for this patch is that we
> have other desktop components that change that file.
> 
> However, I can see your point. Maybe implementing a dbus "reconfigure"
> instead of auto reconfiguring when config files change would be a
> good alternative?

Yeah, was just discussing this with some people here in office.  It
might be worthwhile to implement the dbus interface to re-read specific
classes of configuration rather than inotify monitoring them.  This is
also an issue in 0.7 with the system settings service and system config
plugins.

The downsides of course are that (a) you have to teach your GUI tools
that might modify the config files about NetworkManager, and (b) you
have to create a wrapper around dbus-send for CLI sysadmins so they
don't have to type the entire dbus-send command.

Dan