Re: Annoying NetworkManager "feature"

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 11:59 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 13:08 -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> > I like a lot about how NetworkManager works.  I especially like the way it 
> > handles wireless connects.
> > 
> > However, there is a NetworkManager "feature" that is extremely annoying:  
> > creating new/additional device entries in its list of devices ... sometimes 
> > one or more additional entries with the same name and sometimes "Auto eth_" 
> > entries.
> 
> Which new/additional device entries and what are their names?  When this
> happens, can you run 'nm-tool' for me and paste the output in here?
> 
> The "Auto eth_" entries are there so that you can connect to *something*
> by clicking on it even when there's configuration defined.  Otherwise,
> you'd have nothing in the menu and no way to connect the device.  There
> are a few corner cases where more than one could appear, but I haven't
> seen those in quite a while.
> 
> > This has become especially annoying with a qemu-kvm guest where on of the NICs 
> > needs to have "Use this entry for network connections only on its network" 
> > checked ... new entries are created when NetworkManager starts which do not 
> > have the check.
> > 
> > If there a way to disable this feature? [new/additional entries]
> 
> Do you have backing system connections for any of these devices?
> Basically, a fake "auto" connection will be shown for any device that
> doesn't already have a connection defined either in GConf or via
> system-settings (/etc/network/interfaces for Debian/Ubuntu, ifcfg for
> suse/fedora, and /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections for all distros
> depending on the plugin that's been enabled
> in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf).

Also note that you'll want to lock connections to certain NICs using MAC
addresses.  That way the connection that you mark "only use this
connection for resources on its network" will always get assigned to the
same NIC and your network setup will be stable.  You can do that by
typing in the NIC's MAC address in the "Wired" tab for that connection,
in the "MAC Address" field.

Dan