On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 17:14 -0500, Mike Chambers wrote:
Ok, I want to make sure I understand how this works, or at least see
if
Dan or someone can help explain what/when to use this tool exactly.
Disclaimer: I'm not Dan though I sit a few feet from him and have
discussed this stuff with him a fair bit. Hopefully he'll follow
up and correct me where I'm wrong.
Soo, is network manager *only* (or at least currently) used on
wireless/wired systems (such as laptops obviously) for connecting back
and forth? Or is/can/should it be able to be used normally on just a
wired desktop system as well with no wireless connection?
NetworkManager is certainly intended to handle all systems with a
Desktop running on them. It probably could also handle many server
systems, but for now that's not an explicit target.
And if so, does it start up in the proper place, so the proper
services
will start up and can be used without errors?
This solution for start order problems are two pronged:
A) There's no reason NetworkManager can't be moved earlier (though
starting NetworkManager is as far as I know async, it's not going to
wait until DHCP completes before moving on in the in the init
scripts. Waiting for DHCP can be a pretty big bottleneck in
system startup, so that's probably a good thing, all in all.)
Moving NetworkManager earlier may require moving D-BUS earlier
as well.
B) But the system generally should be fixed so that it can deal
with the network coming up later. After all, if I boot my
desktop and the network cable unplugged, I shouldn't have to reboot
or mount -a to get my network filesystems, should I?
(Using the problem in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439242 as an example.)
I know this topic sort of has/is being discussed, but mainly on
various
topics/problems/bugs. But thought might give Dan an opp. to do a quick
run down on what services to have on/off to get it working, and
what/will work currently with NM starting on boot, in place of
(conjunction with?) normal networking as before.
Services:
NetworkManager: on
network: off. It is possible to mark interfaces
in /etc/sysconfig/network to be skipped by NetworkManager
(you add something like NMCONTROL=off, though that's not the exactly
the right option) and have a hybrid NM + network system, but there's
little point. In the normal case NetworkManager starts everything
including lo.
wpa_supplicant: off (harmless if on, probably will be on in upgraded
systems. It's currently activated by NetworkManager on demand
via D-BUS.)
- Owen