Re: Support for ADSL modems

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2011-05-03 at 19:09 +0300, Pantelis Koukousoulas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just wanted to announce that I 'm going to be working on adding
> support for ADSL
> modems in NetworkManager for a while, as a nice project to learn NM
> internals and

Great!

> in order to finish what we started 2 years ago at Chania LUG's "coding camp".
> It also makes NetworkManager more complete (and if support for old dialup modems
> is also added some time in the future by whatever means, NetworkManager can
> finally become Linux "one stop shop" for client-side network
> configuration, at least
> for me).
> 
> Why ADSL modem support is useful?
> Users have requested it (e.g.,
> http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/item/3853/) and it is also
> among the items in NM TODO file.
> 
> What are you going to work on?
> The initial effort will be for the only related device I already have
> (Sagem FAST 800,
> a USB ADSL modem) and PPPoA, I hope that PCI ADSL devices and PPPoE will
> be supported as well in the future. I know that there is already some
> PPPoE support,
> it just remains to be seen if it can be reused mostly as-is by using the nas0
> interface one gets from br2684 as just another ordinary ethernet device.

I personally have some random Zoom ueagle III based device, so I can at
least help test the carrier stuff and device detection.

> Initially I 'm going to work in NetworkManager and nm-applet. KDE support can be
> written by someone else with my help, or I can write it myself as well
> in the future.
> 
> 
> Existing work
> I have found https://github.com/hicham-haouari/NetworkManager-ADSL-Support
> that has some initial libnm-util work (NMSettingAdsl), unfortunately
> only after I
> implemented this myself as well ( :/ ) so I will try to merge the 2 versions.

Yeah, I talked extensively with hicham and made suggestions on what to
do, so his work is mostly a result of our discussions and where i
thought stuff should go.  I also wrote up those thoughts on that page
which you reference just below here.

> There is also http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/ADSL which I 'm using
> as reference wrt suggested class names etc.
> 
> Is there any other documentation or preliminary implementation? Is anyone else
> working on this so that we can collaborate?

I don't think hicham got as far as an NMDeviceAdsl class or anything,
just the libnm-util/ configuration class bits.  So feel free to run with
it there.

> 
> Code
> My initial experiments are implemented on top of whatever version of
> NetworkManager
> (0.8.x) is in ubuntu maverick since this made it possible to not care
> at all about build
> dependencies etc.
> 
> Are current git tips of NetworkManager/nm-applet stable enough to do the actual
> development on, or are they in a  "turbulence state" right now?

They are actually pretty stable at this point, though the change in the
D-Bus API may cause you some issues.  But as code churn goes we're
almost ready for a release of 0.9 so it's not going to change much.
That said, I'd expect the work on either 0.8.x or 0.9 to port back and
forth without much of a problem since those bits of the code haven't
changed much.

> Are there instructions for how to install the git versions of
> NetworkManager/nm-applet
> in parallel with the system-provided ones (e.g., under /opt) so that
> one can experiment
> with them without breaking existing networking functionality? (I will
> try to do this myself
> anyway, just asking in case I can save the 15 minutes required :P)

Not really, you can certainly install the binaries and libraries into a
different prefix (configure with --prefix, --libdir, --localstatedir, as
appropriate) but of course you cannot run old NM + new NM at the same
time because they would try to manage the same devices, plus the bus
name is the same.  But it may work to just kill the old one and start
the new one.

Let me know how things go, great to hear you're working on this.

Dan