Re: Hack to allow passing Vendor=nortel in network-manager-vpnc

[Sean <shizeon gmail com>]

Thanks Dan and Cyril for the responses.

On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 09:32 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > >   I have compiled the nortel branch of vpnc and can successfully connect
> > > to my corporate network.  Is there a way I can use the vpnc
> > > network-manager plugin and pass the 'Vendor nortel' parameter?  I tried
> > > manually editing the keys in gconf-editor, but that seems to crash nm.
> > > Wondering if there is a hack I can do to make the vendor persistent
> > > since I only connect to nortel vpn endpoints.  Does it look to any
> > > config file for some default options or it is all controlled in gconf?
> > > 
> > 
> > The vendor option of vpnc is currently unsupported in the vpnc plugin :(
> > Read this thread [1] for a similar issue with a Juniper/NetScreen firewall.
> 
> Yeah, if we're going to do it, lets do it right rather than hack stuff
> together.  If I just piled on all the hacks people want, we'd all be
> crushed under their weight by now :)  Thus, the tradeoff between waiting
> a bit longer for your feature, and having it implemented more cleanly so
> that next year NM isn't a piece of crap.

Totally agree.  By hack, I just meant "undocumented feature" of
course.  ;)  I read the thread you referred to and see the current state
or Vendor support.  It appears that the solution in that case/patch was
hardcoding the Netscreen vendor option and some logic in to the
interface.  Since vpnc seems to be expanding support, does it make sense
to include a vendor nortel option since the majority of vpnc users
pulling from repos won't have that option.  It would be cool if it could
somehow interrogate the binary and see which vendors were supported and
enable dynamically.  Anyhow, I'm sure you got a grasp on it.

> I do now have a Netscreen to test against, so you can expect that
> additional NM-vpnc features that I implement are tested against the
> Netscreen.  Thus, this bug will probably get fixed sooner rather than
> later.

Sounds good, very nice plugin.  I will stay tuned in to this list and be
available for testing also if the vendor flag becomes available for
Vendor nortel.

--
Thanks
- Sean