Re: Diskless clients and NetworkManager

[Pablo Martí Gamboa <pmarti warp es>]

2009/4/30 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.

Unfortunately, in today's Linux Desktop this will yield some main application unusable, they all rely on the NetworkManager interface for connectivity status. For projects that provide connectivity (ConnMan, Wader, VMC, K-MobileTools, gnome-ppp, etc.) is a frustrating situation.

Even thou NetworkManager is the de-facto standard tool for managing connectivity, NetworkManager won't always be the solution for everyone. Say you have a token ring connection, NetworkManager doesn't have plans to support it. Say you provide dial up capabilities, like VMC, Wader, etc. It ain't gonna be nice, users have connectivity but applications are not aware. There are workarounds for applications like Firefox, but it is not something that a noob user will understand or do. For other apps like pidgin, there's no workaround AFAIK. Perhaps Moblin has patched Firefox, pidgin, etc. to listen for ConnMan's signals, but this is only possible on the OEM/distro level - i.e. I'm not gonna ship a patched firefox/pidgin/foo that listens for Wader's signals in my ppa/buildservice, it ain't gonna scale.

It is gonna be a though process, but we need to engage all the interested parties on a discussion about how to make applications aware of connectivity changes and come up with a DBus interface that several applications can provide.

I have already expressed this concerns to Dan Williams, and I think that @asac thinks something similar.

What do you guys think?

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

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-- 
Pablo Martí
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