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

[Alexander Sack <asac jwsdot com>]

On Mon, Jun 02, 2008 at 05:40:04PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> 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.

So you want a dbus API that allows more fine grained config reloading
than just "reload everything possible"?

> 
> 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.
> 

a) I dont think this is something that should block this; distros
probably have to maintain such "distro specific" admin tools anyway;
adding a dbus-send after updating any config file should be acceptable
imo.

b) ack

 - Alexander