Re: Diskless clients and NetworkManager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 14:06 +0100, Marc Herbert wrote:
> David Sundqvist a écrit :
> 
> > 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).
> 
> 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.

Its mostly a distro problem; if NM is not managing your default internet
connection, then you should probably turn NM off when setting up the
machine.

The only way you can make intelligent decisions about the network state
on the machine is to make those decisions with *all* the necessary
information, and that means letting NetworkManager control all your
network connections.

There are situations in which NM is not appropriate at this time, and
those are mostly situations where the primary network connection cannot
be controlled by NM for some reason.  Thankfully, there are not too many
of those.  Network-mounted-/usr is one of those cases, as are cases
where the root device is network-mounted, or where the interface cannot
be touched after exiting the initrd.  For now, I'd suggest using the
static config scripts.

A bullet-point on my feature list is to handle this case specifically
for wired non-802.1x connections, because all other types require too
much state to just be taken over post-initrd.

Dan