Re: [PATCH 0/6] Auto-mount network drives per wifi connection

[Gary Ching-Pang Lin <glin suse com>]

Hi Dominik,

在 2012年4月16日下午8:26，Dominik Sommer <dominik sommer name> ?道：
> Hi everybody,
>
> I just finished a patch to NetworkManager & nm-applet that adds
> auto-mounting of network drives on a per-wifi-connection basis.
>
> I already mentioned the raison-d'être on IRC some days ago: I wanted our
> home NAS shares mounted on my wife's laptop whenever she connects it to our
> home wifi. And I wanted it to be easy enough so that she (not having a CS
> degree) would be able to set it up on her own - like the wifi connection or
> connecting the NAS manually. When searching in Google, many people seem to
> have the same problem.
>
> The NetworkManager and its applet seem like the natural place for that
> feature: They distinguish wifi connections and know the connect/disconnect
> events. Considering network drives a network resource would also allow
> adding other resources on a per-connection basis later, such as proxy
> settings (which is on the NM TODO-list) or default printers. So the
> Connection Editor would be the perfect place for configuring these
> resources.
>
> First thing I tried was hooking on to the if-up/down-scripts: This failed,
> as those scripts are run by NetworkManager running as root, while gvfs-mount
> requires access to the user's keyring (which sudo/gksu couldn't provide).
> For this reason, the patch mostly touches nm-applet (running as logged-in
> user).
>
> The patchset consists of the following parts:
> - in NetworkManager/libnm-util: a new settings category,
> nm-settings-resources, holding the uri strings of the network drives to be
> mounted
> - in nm-applet/Connection Editor: a new page (ce-page-resources) for
> configuring auto-mounts for wifi connections
> - in nm-applet/applet-device-wifi: mount configured network drives on
> connect, unmount on disconnect
> - in nm-applet/applet: volume monitor asking the user via libnotify if (s)he
> wishes to add/remove auto-mounts whenever s(he) manually (un)mounts network
> drives via gvfs/nautilus
>
> Along the way, I also updated the settings-template to the best practices I
> found in other settings files (most notably error quarks). I don't know if
> this is correct, but I included the changes in the patch.
>
> The next steps I'd approach would be adding support for VPN connections and
> proxy settings. Before I begin, I'd appreciate feedback for the patch:
> - Does it make sense this way?
> - Doing the actual mounts/unmounts in applet-device-wifi is clearly the
> wrong place. I'd think of a general resources class in nm-applet that would
> be signaled from each supported applet-device-* class.
> - Changing the (network drives configuration) requires getting & re-storing
> the specific secret settings, which makes the code more complex. This
> probably gets worse when supporting more connection types. Maybe there's
> another way?
> - There might be a better place than the applet class for the volume monitor
> - The unmount counting would formally be more correct with
> white/blacklisting the network drives that re auto-unmounted (rather than
> basically just disabling the monitor for 10 seconds)
>
The idea of the auto-mount on wifi connection is really interesting and
nice-to-have. However, since the mount/umount operations are implemented
in nautilus/gvfs, I wonder if it would be better to implement it in
nautilus/gvfs
as an extension.

If you just need the connection/disconnection events or the name of the
wifi AP or VPN, it's possible to get those information through the
NetworkManager dbus interface.

For example, the property of /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager, state,
can be used to check if the system is online or offline.

Monitoring the wifi SSID might be tricky but possible. You can monitor
the dbus object of the devices, eg. /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Device/0,
if the device type is wifi, and checks the ActiveAccessPoint property to
get the dbus object of the connected AP and then retrieve the information
you need.

Besides the dbus interface, the APIs in nm-glib could make things easier.

Hope this helps.

Gary Lin

> I wasn't sure on how to send this patch, so I try to imitate the style I
> found in the archives:
>
> NetworkManager:
>  libnm-util/Makefile.am            |    2 +
>  libnm-util/libnm-util.ver         |   13 ++
>  libnm-util/nm-connection.c        |   25 +++-
>  libnm-util/nm-connection.h        |    2 +
>  libnm-util/nm-setting-resources.c |  381
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  libnm-util/nm-setting-resources.h |   90 +++++++++
>  libnm-util/nm-setting-template.c  |   26 +++-
>  libnm-util/nm-setting-template.h  |    3 +
>  libnm-util/nm-utils.c             |   49 +++++
>  libnm-util/nm-utils.h             |    2 +
>  libnm-util/tests/test-general.c   |   55 ++++++
>  11 files changed, 646 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> nm-applet:
>  src/applet-device-wifi.c                     |  189 ++++++++-
>  src/applet.c                                 |  441 +++++++++++++++++++
>  src/applet.h                                 |    6 +
>  src/connection-editor/Makefile.am            |    3 +
>  src/connection-editor/ce-page-resources.ui   |  155 +++++++
>  src/connection-editor/nm-connection-editor.c |    3 +
>  src/connection-editor/page-resources.c       |  588
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  src/connection-editor/page-resources.h       |   58 +++
>  8 files changed, 1434 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
>
> - splitted into 6 mails, logically grouped.
>
> Excited for the reactions - this is my first contribution to an OS project
> ever!
>
> Dominik
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