Re: ppp and "offline state"



100% ACK to the whole of that!

-nik

Christopher Lang schrieb:
> Hi,
>
>   
>> Then, in the network connections menu, an item "externally managed
>> connection"...
>>     
>
> as stated in a similar post on lwn, I would like to strongly second the below. 
> There are some folks out there who are working on proprietary/corporate 
> connection managers (incuding myself) and currently NM just locks them out 
> and causes them a lot of trouble.
>
> A few small features could easily rectify the situation and I do not think 
> that externally managed connections would cause too much trouble for NM:
>
> - dbus method(s) that allows to make NM aware of a custom connection and its 
> status
> - A dbus method that allows external applications to tell NM to leave a 
> particular device/interface alone
>
> I think that nobody is asking to change major NM workings, just the very 
> minimum to allow custom connections to co-exist, and avoid these troublesome 
> Firefox, Evolution, resolv.conf etc. etc. issues.
>
> thanks for your patience,
> Chris
>
> http://www.acurana.de/
>
>
> On Monday 07 September 2009 12:53:58 Pietro Battiston wrote:
>   
>> By looking at bugs filed and words spent in several different bug
>> trackers and mailing lists, I fear NM developers may be quite allergic
>> to the words forming the subject of this email, but though indeed the
>> problem gathered a big attention, I didn't find any (reasonably recent)
>> documented answer to the three questions I'm asking, so here ends the
>> prologue:
>>
>>
>> 1) the most clear answer I found to the claim:
>>
>> "NM doesn't support generic ppp, so I must connect with
>> $APP_TO_HANDLE_PPP_CONNECTION and NM doesn't notice it, so
>> $APP_USING_NETWORK doesn't connect, thinking I'm disconnected"
>>
>> is at [0] and basically says:
>>
>> "nobody is working on it, if somebody would like to, please step in".
>>
>> This was obviously an admissible position; is it still true, or did the
>> creation of MobileManager change future hopes of generic (or at least
>> bluetooth) ppp support in NM? I ask it because the name of the project
>> seems to suggest it, though in presenting it at [1], Dan only talks
>> about "All mobile broadbands", and the same does the README.
>>
>>
>> 2) supposing that answer to 1) is "no, people connecting via a
>> traditional modem or a mobile via bluetooth shouldn't just hope NM
>> supporting them soon", then wouldn't it make sense to allow _setting_,
>> instead than just _querying_, online/offline status via DBUS?
>>
>> This would allow, with few lines of code, tools like Gnome-PPP to say
>> "hey, NM, we _are_ online"[2]
>>
>> Then, in the network connections menu, an item "externally managed
>> connection" could also possibly show up and activate...
>>
>> I perfectly understand this is not something NM developers dream of,
>> being not part of the standard infrastructure, but it would be of huge
>> help to those who - like me and many people I know of (BTW, from
>> personal experience I frankly doubt about the 98% Alexander's estimate
>> in [0]) - need to connect via bluetooth/standard modems (it may be OT,
>> but let me mention that this is one of the few things Windows/OS X
>> softwares do nicely since many years and Linux Desktop doesn't).
>>
>> I (don't know NM internals and) suppose some things may not work as
>> usually: for instance, I can imagine sharing a connection would be a
>> problem, if NM doesn't control it... but _this_ is really a minor
>> problem.
>>
>>
>> 3) Why was PPP generic support dropped? Because it was broken/lacking
>> manpower or just because mobile broadband support covered many of the
>> use cases of it?
>>
>>
>> thanks for your patience in answering(/providing me pointers if the
>> questions are indeed answered elsewhere).
>>
>> Pietro Battiston
>>
>> [0]
>> http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/220497/
>> [1]
>> http://blogs.gnome.org/dcbw/2009/03/20/thats-when-i-reach-for-my-revolver/
>> [2]
>> They could also say "hey, NM, we are online thanks to the process with
>> pid $pid, assume we are online as long as it is alive!", or "we are
>> online thanks to card ppp*, assume we are online until it exists!"...
>> but this is not _so_ necessary, since it would be easy, for the calling
>> app, to spawn a separate monitoring process which finally would say
>> "hey, NM, control back to you" at the end of the connection.
>>     
>
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>
>   


-- 
Dominik George

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