Re: NetworkManager on routers

[Pavel Simerda <psimerda redhat com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Philip Boulain" <philip boulain smoothwall net>
> I know NetworkManager's main design goal is to be a daemon to manage
> network connections on a *client* machine, and get them a working
> Internet connection out under changing circumstances.

Correct.

> How suitable do you feel that it is to use NetworkManager in a
> *router* role, where it is being asked to apply and respond to
> queries about an arbitrary number of more complicated devices and
> connections?

I must admit I always liked the OpenWRT UCI-style configuration for routers. NetworkManager is already 
designed to deal with bridges, bonds, vlans and to provide services to virtualization solutions. Whether it 
would make a good router configuration solution, remains a question.

It might need some improvements and we are certainly not against improving NM to fit this use case better, if 
we can avoid damage to traditional use cases.

> I am investigating redesigning how we handle interfaces on an
> embedded
> router/firewall product, and our requirements at a low level are some
> form of daemon which can be instructed to bring up network interfaces
> with given configurations (which may be static IP, DHCP, etc.), and
> can be queried for information about them (e.g. address allocated by
> the DHCP server). At a rough level, NM does fit this bill, and to a
> large extent its "desktop-y" behaviour can be disabled by setting
> devices to manual or unmanaged (and we may want to do so for
> complicated VPN/bridge/bonding configurations if NM can't or
> shouldn't
> be expanded to fit our needs here), but I am interested in opinions
> on the idea from your end: how plausible does this sound?

We are already working on disabling the desktopy behavior for cases that require it. So if this is your only 
concern, NetworkManager's upcoming releases should make you happy. If you have any other concerns, please 
speak up.

Cheers,

Pavel