Re: Diskless clients and NetworkManager



Quoting Marc Herbert <Marc Herbert gmail com>:
There seems to be something fundamentally wrong in this no-connection/
/offline thing. Since NM can be configured to manage _not all_
interfaces (including none at all) then why are some applications
wrongly assuming NM is always managing the entire network
configuration? This seems to be where the bug lies and should be
fixed.

Perhaps. Taking a quick look at the NM project webpage, it's not really that farfetched: "Using the awesome power and flexibility of dbus and hal, NetworkManager provides facilities for other applications like browsers, email clients, or system services to be aware of the network's state and adjust their operation accordingly."

That certainly could sound fairly authoritative to a presumptive software developer, so I can understand why they make that assumption.

Is there other buggy applications that people should be afraid of
besides firefox?

Lots. And I'd expect them to increase, as an app that could give an authoritative statement on connectivity, as far as it's possible, would certainly be useful. As I see it there are basically two possible solutions:

1) Let NetworkManager have some form of 'read-only' interfaces or forced mode setting, in the cases where it can't appropriately manage the interface. I found some threads relating to diskless clients suggesting that NM could not be entirely trusted to keep its hands off the interface so I'd be hesitant to let it manage the interface providing root/swap disk access.

2) Disabuse application developers of the notion that NetworkManager has an accurate status. The first step of which would be to change the project page a bit to say "be aware of NM's perhaps not entirely accurate idea of the network's state"

The current workaround, unless I've missed a better alternative, appears to deactivate or even uninstall NetworkManager, but if it's moving towards being a tightly integrated piece of software it might be more practical to have things at least not get broken by having it active.

So personally I'd prefer the first alternative, but it might be hard to find a solution that fits NM in an architecturally nice way. I don't know NM well enough to judge if some kind of 'read-only' or 'locked-on' interfaces would be conceptually sane, but that would at least be less ugly than options to force NM to say anything, or a fake NM talking dbus to convince apps the system is on line.

Cheers,
David

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