Re: stopping modem manager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sat, 2010-09-25 at 21:12 -0300, José Queiroz wrote:
> 
> 
> 2010/9/25 Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
>         On Mon, 2010-08-23 at 17:31 +0100, Rune Gellein wrote:
>         > Hi,
>         
>         > I tried to just kill the modem manager, but Network manager
>         started it
>         > again, so if you remove it, network manager will continue to
>         try to
>         > start it in the background.
>         > And because of these dependencies, when you update the
>         system again,
>         > the modem manager will be pulled back in (at least in
>         gentoo).
>         >
>         > So what I am looking for is a setting in the Network manager
>         > configuration to stop it from loading the modem manager at
>         all.
>         >
>         > Anything like that available?
>         
>         
>         At this time, you either remove the modem-manager package, or
>         you remove
>         the dbus auto-activation file referenced earlier in this
>         thread.
>         
>         I have various ideas how to only run ModemManager on-demand,
>         which
>         basically revolve around using udev to spawn ModemManager if
>         it's not
>         already running when a new serial port appears, and have MM
>         quit if it's
>         not managing any modems.  NM would then stop poking MM
>         automatically,
>         and just rely on its presence.
>         
>         The one thing that doesn't solve is if MM crashes, it wouldn't
>         necessarily get restarted automatically, which is quite useful
>         to
>         recover from bugs for users that don't know how to manually
>         restart it.
>         
>         Dan
> 
> And what about creating a "[modem-manager]" section on
> NetworkManager.conf? This way we could have a "disabled=true"
> directive to avoid loading MM, and a "debug=<level>" to easy debugging
> it.

Maybe, but I'd like to solve this the right way instead of adding more
and more config options; there are already a bunch.  However, I'd
entertain a patch which did this as long as it also correctly returned
an error back to the caller when ModemManager isn't running and a mobile
broadband connection was requested.

For debugging, that's something that needs to be fixed in ModemManager
itself, and debugging options should be tunable via SIGHUP or a D-Bus
method.  MM gets autospawned so callers don't have an opportunity to
specify --debug on the command line unless it's run manually by the
user.

Dan