Diskless clients and NetworkManager

[David Sundqvist <glist dystopic org>]

Hi,

I'm looking for some suggestions as to how to configure Network  
Manager appropriately and safely for clients booting off PXE with  
iSCSI root.

The clients are Fedora 10 with NM 0.7.0.99.

Currently the network connection is unmanaged by NM, but as desktop  
programs start using NM, it would be nice if it would be possible to  
configure a connection that NM will see, but never, ever, attempt to  
touch in any way (any kind of hiccup in the device will result in  
instant freeze as swap goes off line which tends to put a permanent  
stop to any further attempts to do anything at all).

The boot is basically done off PXE,  a fixed IP address (tied to MAC)  
is assigned via DHCP, and then it loads kernel and initrd for iSCSI  
connections. So any network setup that should ever be done on that  
device is set even before it exits the initrd.

If I set it to be managed by NM, will NM try to manage it in any way?  
Can I set it to be seen, but still unmanaged? Or maybe I could get NM  
to always output a connected status instead of a no-connection which  
triggers firefox offline mode, etc. (should the connection be lost,  
well, then NM won't be able to detect it anyway due to being frozen on  
the first page touch).

Sorry if it's a common question, and my lack of understanding of NM,  
but I couldn't find any similar problems in the archives recently...
Best regard.
David

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