Re: new feature

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 10:02 +0100, Marc Herbert wrote:
> Avi Levy a écrit :
> 
> > I've noticed that there doesn't seem to be any sort of graphical network
> > activity log in network manager. How hard would it be to implement something
> > of this sort (I'm thinking of it as an analogue to the feature in ubuntu's
> > system monitor dialogue box, which allows one to display a history of
> > network activity, cpu use, etc. This feature would be useful and attractive
> > if it were added to network manager, in my opinion. It could allow one to
> > keep track of signal strength in dB and otherwise, as well as connection
> > speed, messages dropped, etc. What is everyone's opinion?
> 
> Please correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like that most of (if not all) the primary sources of such monitoring information are actually located _outside_ of NM. So what would be the benefit(s) of implementing such a tool inside NM?

I tend to thing add-on tools would be the best place for this sort of
thing rather than putting it in nm-applet itself.  That doesn't mean we
could have buttons to pop up that tool from somewhere in nm-applet (like
the connection information dialog or something).  But we do want to
avoid adding everything and the kitchen sink to NM.

One exception would be connection duration monitoring and cumulative
rx/tx amounts, which are quite useful for mobile broadband and such.  So
in some way, yes, we do want to add some of this to NM itself (probably
stored in an sqlite database or something) and expose a D-Bus API that
people can query.  nm-applet would at least use this to warn about
approaching mobile broadband traffic limits.  Not sure how much info we
really do want to keep.  At some level, NM is the only thing that knows
*exactly* how much gets transferred during a connection.  Yes, you can
look at the interface itself with ifconfig, that's tracking the device
and not the actual connection.

Dan