Re: suspend/deactivate devices in modem manager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2010-01-21 at 09:48 +0100, Mark Haack (werk55.de) wrote:
> Hi Dan
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Dan Williams" <dcbw redhat com>
> To: "Mark Haack" <Mark Haack werk55 de>
> Cc: <networkmanager-list gnome org>; "Tambet Ingo" <tambet gmail com>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 10:17 PM
> Subject: Re: suspend/deactivate devices in modem manager
> 
> 
> > On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 16:12 +0100, Mark Haack wrote:
> >> Hi Dan
> >> Hi Ingo
> >>
> >> I'm looking for a way to disable particular devices in modem manager.
> >> I.e.
> >> (a) my application wants to handle a huwei device by it's own,
> >> (b) without interupting the user for the configuration by the nm
> >> applet, which means my app provides settings for it
> >>
> >> As far I can see the device support is compiled into the mm as
> >> plugins? Is there
> >> a external, configuration (xml) file, which declares that product id +
> >> vendor id belongs to a certain plugin.
> >
> > The plugins each are responsible for detecting what devices they handle.
> > At this point it's a combination of driver name matching ('hso' for
> > example) and USB vid/pid matching.  I generally stay away from
> > explicitly listing devices in udev rules files (like windows .INF files
> > always do) because that's a huge pain to maintain.
> >
> > But given that most configurations are not going to have multiple mobile
> > broadband devices, perhaps your configurations don't want to run
> > ModemManager then?
> >
> > Dan
> >
> >
> >
> 
> you´re right. For my configuration I choose the following design.
> I stop the networkmanager  if app begins the operation and restart it after 
> all is done.
> So in that case, there is no competition with each other. App can handles 
> all of its own, despite of all the wifi goodies in nm.
> 
> I would like to use more of nm, but there some missing crunch points
> 
> 1. a modem manager fascade to use my own modem manager implementation 
> dynamically

The ModemManager D-Bus API is specified and there's already alternative
implementations; you can certainly write your own service conforming to
the MM D-Bus API and NetworkManager will happily use it instead of
modem-manager itself.

> 2. or a plugin api for UI elements to customize it. (there is dbus okay, but 
> I cant stop annoying nm dialogs)

3. We can enhance ModemManager and the D-Bus API to provide the
functionality you require (within reason of course), which is my
preferred solution.

Dan