Re: Back to technical discussion? Yes! (was: network-manager as default? No!)
On Mon, Apr 04, 2011 at 07:39:23PM -0300, Fernando Lemos wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre
> <mathieu.tl@gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> > This said, I don't think NM can be the magic bullet to fix everything.
> > Even RedHat while shipping NetworkManager on servers last I checked,
> > still relies on their simpler command-line setup for interfaces. So
> > should we. Defaulting to using NM probably takes care of the widest
> > audience who would use DHCP and such, and others can fall back to
> > ifupdown or a successor to do the more complicated things like
> > bridging.
>
> Also note that there are NM plugins that enable NM to understand
> /etc/network/interfaces and the Fedora/RHEL counterparts. This means
> that if a server has NM enabled and an administrator wants to
> configure networking manually, he can do it just fine even if NM is
> installed. NM will gracefully understand that and won't try to do
> anything stupid (see /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf).
The mentioned plugin is nothing more than just a rather primitive
parser intended to read a limited set of common interface settings
such as ip addresses, netmasks, dns servers, etc., from the existing
/e/n/interfaces file for the ease of transition. The plugin simply
translates these settings into the internal representation of NM. It
is not intended to interoperate with the ifupdown infrastructure in
any other way.
Therefore, it is generally useless for an administrator that wants to
configure network interfaces manually.
> For servers using DHCP, you don't even have to create a connection.
> Wired interfaces are already automatically configured to use DHCP in
> NM. For the other cases, just use the legacy tools or configure
> /etc/network/interfaces and set managed=true
Accordingly to docs here http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/SystemSettings
that should be actually "managed=false" if you want an interface to be
completely ignored by NM.
> in /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf (not sure if the latter
> works, never tested it).
--
Stanislav
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