Re: Network Manager does not find system wide connections

[Graham Lyon <graham lyon gmail com>]

2009/8/9 Hadmut Danisch <hadmut danisch de>

Graham Lyon wrote:
>
>
> Then documentation should be fixed, not the method itself. DBus is the
> best approach to do this, it uniffies IPC in unix, which is a *good*
> thing.

Network configuration is such an essential and basic function, that it
should not depend
on IPC.  IPC means that  several processes must exist, and this is error
prone by default.

IPC may be an addon, but it should work without IPC.

I can see what you're saying here and I sympathise. Perhaps the best solution would be one where there is a single NM daemon on the system level that manages the interfaces and deal with the system config and then supplies a (probably the same) DBus API that allows user processes to manage user-configured connections. A merger of NetworkManager and nm-system-settings, basicly. This removes the need for IPC in order to get the core of it working whilst at the same time still supplying the same funcionality. The more that I think about it the more I agree with you on this point that NetworkManager shouldn't be useless without DBus and the nm-settings-daemon running also.

> NM is not interweaved with desktop applications. You're confusing the
> user settings manager with network manager itself.

A plain user will store his network settings under Gnome or KDE and such
within the Gnome and KDE
configuration methods. This depends on desktop applications. Without a
desktop network manager will
not find any user specific config. 

I'm not entirely sure what you meant here, but I suspect you mean that an ordinary user will configure their system using the applets in gnome/kde and so their settings will not be system settings? They only need to tick the "make available to all users" ticky box. If I completely misread what you're saying, please do correct me.

And I did not yet see any command line front end.

There is cnetworkmanager, apparently (I've never used it) and there was discussions on this list somewhere about a rewrite of it to make it more functional.
 

> It's actually the best way to get the two levels of configuration that
> I can think of.

Storing network configuration in Gnome or KDE in a way that they are not
available if someone uses the other Desktop is a bad idea. Network
settings are
not desktop settings and thus should not be stored in the Gnome or KDE
configuration.

Fair point, but how often do you switch to using the other desktop environment as the same user login? It's not a particularly common use case... I will admit that the network settings are not part of your desktop settings and the problem here is that there is no unified settings daemon for all user's applications (something like this is really lacking in the world of linux and would be great as it would stop everyone having to roll their own config file reading/writing mechanism.
 

> It doesn't need a running desktop to be configured, and lots of system
> relevent applications require DBus (it's not a desktop program).

And that's wrong.

DBus is not started in single user mode. So NetworkManager could not be
used in single user mode.

A network configuration that does not work in single user mode is a flaw.

See above. I'm not particularly familiar with single user mode (I've never had the need to use it, rather thankfully) but is it possible that dbus could be added to the things that are started in single user mode?
 

>     Networking must be able to work even in single user mode in a simple

>     terminal
>     with a shell session and must not depend on anything else.
>
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it does as long as the daemon is
> started and the system settings daemon is started.

That's one of the problems. Network configuration must not depend on
that many daemons.

Network configuration must be able to work on its own, even if
everything else is absent.

I proposed a possible solution to this a little further up in this mail. I'm not sure how the devs will feel about it but it actually makes more sense from a design point of view to me. Though I don't pretend to know about the network manager internals so it could be impossible...

Graham