Testing netapplet
I wrote:
> I must say that I fear a repetition of our past experience with
> network configuration tools ported from other distributions.
Just as I feared, netapplet in its current form[1] _is_ a repetition
of past experience.
I install the package which starts a new daemon, running as root,
called 'netdaemon'. I run netapplet as a normal user. This
communicates with the netdaemon process; it receives updates each
second of the list of logical interface definitions in
/etc/network/interfaces and of those currently active. An icon
appears in the GNOME Panel Notification Area. I click it and get
this drop-down menu:
-------------------------
Network Connections <-- greyed out
Unknown: wlanp_0 (active)
Ethernet: home-wired
Ethernet: home-wireless
Ethernet: home-dhcp
Dialup: ppp0
Disconnect
-------------------------
Wireless disabled <-- greyed out
-------------------------
Connection Information
Configure Network Settings
-------------------------
Remove from Panel
-------------------------
This makes little sense. Yes, wlanp_0 is one of my interfaces
(named that way using ifrename). However, home-* are the names of
_logical_ interfaces defined in /etc/network/interfaces. Merely as
such they aren't Ethernet interfaces or any other link-level type of
interfaces; they are profiles, in a sense, that can be applied to
real interfaces.
wlanp_0 _is_ sort of an Ethernet interface (... it is reported to
be such by ifconfig), but it is described as "Unknown". Actually,
the wlanp_0 interface is Wi-Fi. Strangely, the "Wireless" line is
greyed out and labelled "disabled".
Yes, wlanp_0 is "active". Of the logical interfaces you could say
that home-dhcp is active because wlanp_0 is currently configured as
home-dhcp, but this would not be in the same sense.
Basically, it does not make sense to put physical interfaces and
logical interfaces in the same list. It makes as little sense to
put the "Disconnect" action in that list.
Here is the reality that the netapplet so poorly describes:
# grep iface /etc/network/interfaces
iface lo inet loopback
iface home-wired inet static
iface home-wireless inet static
iface home-dhcp inet dhcp
iface ppp0 inet ppp
# cat /etc/network/ifstate
lo=lo
wlanp_0=home-dhcp
# ifconfig | grep Link
lo Link encap:Local Loopback
wlanp_0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:07:0E:B3:89:8E
Anyway, let's carry on with the experiment. Apprehensively (because
it is clear that this program is very, very confused) I click on
"Connection Information" and I get a popup window with the following
information:
Active Connection Information
Interface: wlanp_0
Type: Unknown
IP Address: 192.168.0.2
Broadcast Address: 192.168.0.255
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Hardware Address: 00:70:E0:B3:A8:E8
OK, except for the Type.
If I click on "Configure Network Settings" then I get the even
more broken network-admin module of the gnome-system-tools.
I close _that_ program immediately because it will mangle
/etc/network/interfaces and /etc/hosts if given half a chance.
Apprehensively I click on "Ethernet: home-wireless" to see if the
program is capable of reconfiguring wlanp_0 as the home-wireless
logical interface instead of the home-dhcp logical interface.
I see this in the terminal window where I started netapplet:
1093626205: outgoing: change home-wireless
1093626205: incoming: active home-wireless
Temporarily the dropdown list shows "Ethernet: home-wireless"
as active, but after some seconds it reverts to the original
display. The actual network configuration has not changed.
Summary: although I am using standard Debian network configuration
tools (ifupdown) in the way described in their man pages and in
Debian manuals, this program is utterly incapable of either
interpreting my network configuration or modifying it. I hope
that the ITPer[2] will fix these problems before uploading it
to the archive.
[1] http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/
[2] http://bugs.debian.org/267908
--
Thomas Hood
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