Re: dbus and OpenVPN Autostart

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:26 +0200, Tambet Ingo wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 18:47, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 11:37 +1100, David Guest wrote:
> >> I am attempting to create a dispatcher script to autostart an OpenVPN
> >> connection, I am stuck on how to get the vpn to connect through dbus.
> >> Would anyone have a working example, preferably in python but any
> >> language will do?
> >>
> >> I am running Ubuntu 8.10 (NetworkManager 0.7), I have found at least one
> >> example on the web but it appears to be for an earlier dbus Network
> >> Manager API version as I get errors when running them.
> >>
> >> I have looked at the 0.7 dbus API but can't figure out what to send to
> >> the org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.VPN.Plugin.Connect method or even if
> >> this is the right approach?
> >
> > That's actually the wrong approach here; what you want to do is tell
> > _NetworkManager_ to connect the VPN connection.  So you'll be using the
> > org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.ActivateConnection method, and pass it
> > the service name of the settings service (either user or system) that
> > provides the connection, the object path of the connection as exported
> > by that settings service, and the device you'd like to activate the VPN
> > on (which would be the object path of the interface your script got
> > called with, probably).
> 
> This functionality is very often requested and a dispatcher script to
> do that is quite hard to implement. I wrote a script to do that, see
> the attachment. It needs some configuration first: The UUID of the VPN
> connection you'd like to get automatically activated, the UUID of the
> connection with which you want your VPN automatically activated, and
> the UID of the user who has the VPN connection defined. For the first
> two, just run the script without any arguments and it'll print out all
> known connections and their UUIDS. Find your UID with `id -u`. After
> changing these variables in the beginning of the script with your
> data, copy it to /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ and make sure it's
> executable.
> 
> Dan, maybe it makes sense to add some example dispatcher scripts to
> the tree, starting with this one? There's a lot you can do with these,
> change active printers, proxies, mounts, ..., and many people have no
> idea how useful they can be.

Sure!  Feel free to add it.  Note that git as of this morning allows
root to activate user connections as well; so the comment in the script
is somewhat misleading.

Dan