On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 3:17 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj(a)redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 13:13 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>>> I agree with the desire to maintain only one tool. However, NM is
>>> extremely desktop oriented, and there seems to include no hint of an
>>> intention to support the complex setups that are possible with the old
>>> ifcfg infra.
>>
>> Really? Most of the work over the past couple of years in NM seems to
>> be aimed at trying to support these cases as opposed to just the
>> "simple" desktop case
>
> That's odd -- I've never seen any of it. Are there good examples of
> how you configure a server to do special stuff with it? Or a
> 'scripting network-manager' guide somewhere?
A bit of reading of the NM website and published docs makes me think
that Jeremy is probably overoptimistic about the applicability of NM
to server roles, and any intentions of scriptability.
The design goals don't include scriptability or anything that would
resonate with sysadmins:
http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/developers/design_goals.html
The page for administrators doesn't provide anything useful
http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/admins/
And looking for an API leads me to this page (which is probably
outdated) - a very limited API that won't do any of the things I need
in the School Server.
http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/NetworkManager%20DBUS%20API.txt
In summary I don't think NM is designed for this. OTOH, it does the
desktop thing well...
It goes back to documentation. While the project as a whole is pretty
good at code, we're horrible at documentation. We do have D-Bus
interface documentation however. The project site desperately needs to
updated for NM 0.7.
Dan