Re: Documentation of all the various NM pieces and how they fit?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2008-05-01 at 19:37 -0700, Kenneth Crudup wrote:
> Is there a block diagram or the like out there? I'm sure by now that my
> issues with not being able to manage any network connections are due to
> some piece being missing, but I can't really tell what.

Not quite yet; the documentation that currently exists (thanks Will!) is
for talking to NM over D-Bus.

However, there are a few key pieces:

NetworkManager: controls network interfaces, brings connections (and the
devices the connection applies to) up and down.  Can be told what to do
by users.

Applet: run in a desktop session, displays the status of network
devices, available wireless networks, allows the user to control
NetworkManager.  Provides "connections" (ie, saved wireless networks or
wired settings or whatever) to NM which are stored in the user's
preferences.

System Settings service: provides system-wide settings to
NetworkManager, through distro-specific plugins that translate the
distros native network config file format into "connections" that
NetworkManager can use to bring devices up and down.

That's about it.  All communication relies on D-Bus, so if D-Bus isn't
correctly set up on your machine, or if you don't have pam_console
installed (Fedora, Suse) or you aren't in the netdev group (Debian-based
distros) then you won't have the permissions to talk to NM.

Can you describe a bit more about what the NM behavior is?  Could you
include some logs from /var/log/messages or wherever your distro dumps
NM's syslog output?

Thanks,
Dan