On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 10:25 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 01:04:43AM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> The pluses are that:
> - it should be able to boot up faster (note the should)
Because of delaying network initialization, or something else? I'm generally
not interested in boot time per se except in the sense of
time-to-fully-operational. (For machines with static addresses -- this isn't
the laptop case.)
If you have a wired interface marked for DHCP, but no cable plugged in,
and ONBOOT=yes, the network service will block waiting until the DHCP
timeout. In general, you want connections to come up as they become
available.
> - it informs applications that you're connected to the
network (say, you
> unplug the network, the router dies, or the driver for your network card
> drops you off the network)
I can see this being handy in some cases, but mostly, the network status of
statically-configured machines is generally best monitored externally.
> - and finally, it will allow routing over multiple connections in the
> future (so static wired, and wireless routed over the wired, or all the
> wired routed over a WWAN in case your internet connection breaks).
This can be done already with static configuration, but if it makes an
auto-fallback easy to configure that does seem like a plus -- but very
special purpose.
C'mon, seriously, is that all you've got? :)
The real major plus I see is: "It's good for the desktop, so doing it on
servers means it all works the same." But that's kind of a hard sell -- and
since in many cases I end up the one _making_ the sell, I'd like something
more to work with.
Many of the features of NetworkManager do make life easier on desktops
and aren't as useful on a server machine. So if you're just interested
in servers, the story shouldn't be any different with NM than with the
'network' service, except that NM provides a single source for
information about the network that programs can query.
If you're using a single ethernet adapter, statically configured,
without a desktop, and only running say httpd and samba, then no, you
probably don't want to use NM. You certainly _could_ if you wanted to.
If we're talking about GUIs, or more mobile machines like laptops or
mobile internet devices, or desktops in general, or multi-user systems
where finer-grained control of network devices is desired, then I can
list more advantages of NetworkManager.
Dan