VPN connection with no device or address

[Dan Fruehauf <malkodan gmail com>]

G'day,

Maintaining the NetworkManager-ssh module I've got recently an inquiry by someone who wants to just use NetworkManager-ssh for port binding. While NetworkManager-ssh supports port binding by custom command line arguments I still couldn't figure out whether NetworkManager will support device-less, address-less VPN types.

Looks like in nm-vpn-plugin.c, at nm_vpn_plugin_set_config there is something looking for either ip4 or ip6 configuration. But what if I want to supply none?

Yes I know, this is definitely not a VPN, if all you go for is port binding and not full communications. Perhaps another elegant solution can come in handy. What I could do (and would) is use NM_VPN_PLUGIN_IP6_CONFIG_NEVER_DEFAULT and NM_VPN_PLUGIN_IP4_CONFIG_NEVER_DEFAULT, which will not disrupt normal communications should the user chooses not to.

I truly believe that after multiple simultaneous VPNs will be implemented (and also before, just with one VPN), many people would be happy to use multiple port bindings simultaneously using SSH. It's a really handy thing after all and NetworkManager-ssh already supports this.

Any feedback welcome.

Thanks,
Dan.