Re: Diskless clients and NetworkManager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2009-04-26 at 23:36 +0200, David Sundqvist wrote:
> 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).

Yes, if you set it to be managed by NM, NM will touch it, and that's
probably not what you want.

The boot-from-iscsi/fcoe problem is known, and something I will be
spending time on in the near future.  But at the moment, you might be
better off turning NM off on these devices (chkconfig NetworkManager
off) and letting the old 'network' service handle them.

Dan

> 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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