On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 10:56 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
3) Full access to DHCP options. NetworkManager provides a DBUS API
for
applications to access DHCP options returned by the server. For
example, ntpd could listen to NetworkManager events and then restart
itself with the new server address without ever having to read a config
file. xchat could listen to events and find out the corporate IRC
server to connect to without ever needing user intervention. There's a
wealth of information passed along in DHCP options that applications can
use. I'm unaware of any method that "dhclient" has that could provide
this information to NetworkManager.
Again, I currently use FC3 stuff, so I'm not sure how this applies here,
but when I last looked at it, only few information where passed to the
NMTester.py script in the examples directory. Maybe I got things wrong
(perhaps the app has to ask for DHCP specific stuff -- I'm a complete
neophyte when it comes to dbus e.a.), but I didn't see any information
related to DHCP there. Furthermore: AFAIK DHCP options get only
transmitted from the server when the client asks for them, so how would
I go about "custom" DHCP options I wanted to evaluate?
In the ideal world, there would be a DBUS wrapper to dhclient that
exposed what was needed. That wrapper could communicate with dhclient
through OMAPI, but it would be better to just make dhclient DBUS-aware
in the first place to cut down on the "hordes of daemons" syndrome. In
this manner, dhclient could publish its own DHCP options interface and
NetworkManager wouldn't need to care about it. NM would simply become a
dbus client of dhclient.
That'd indeed be good, it would only leave me to finally learn dbus a
bit more.
Nils
--
Nils Philippsen / Red Hat / nphilipp(a)redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- B. Franklin, 1759
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