On Fri, 2016-05-13 at 11:23 -0700, John Boiles wrote:
There's a problem I deal with that I bet a lot of other people deal with as well: getting headless machines (for me, usually Raspberry Pi) to connect to a wifi network. Usually this involves connecting the hardware to a wired connection, then configuring wifi over ssh. This is a pain, especially if the device is somewhere that's hard to get physical access to. I've been thinking about creating a daemon that runs alongside Network Manager that exposes an interface over BLE that can list and configure wireless connections in network manager. Then, I could create a simple mobile app that could remotely configure network manager over BLE. This would allow for much easier wifi configuration on headless devices. This could be especially useful now that the Raspberry Pi 3 has both bluetooth and wifi built-in. I'd be down to build the iOS app (free and oss) and potentially the part of the daemon that communicates over BLE, but could use some help building the part that interfaces with NM. At very least some architecture guidance would be helpful. Anyone interested in working on this project?
Hi John, I don't know about BLE, but interfacing with NM works like this: Your daemon would D-Bus with NM. All other clients (nm-applet to nmcli) use the same interface. https://developer.gnome.org/NetworkManager/unstable/index.html D-Bus can be nicely implemented in most programming languages, so for example for a Python daemon, it should be pretty comfortable. NM core project also ships a glib-based client library that wraps the D-Bus interface: libnm. libnm might be more comfortable to use from python, via GObject introspection. Downside is, that libnm only exists for NetworkManager >= 1.0 libnm is always available where NM is (so, it's not really an additional dependency). I personally would start without using libnm. I think using plain D-Bus tends to work nicely. But others might disagree here. There exists libnm-glib, which is a deprecated version of libnm. That one supports versions < 1.0 as well, but should not be used anymore because it doesn't get new features. NetworkManager generally thinks in terms of "connections" (aka profiles). You create and modify them. Then you "activate" them on a device, meaning to apply the configuration to a networking interface. See https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/examples best, Thomas
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