NetworkManager: I want to believe, but... [was Re: F9 potential service network bug?]

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 12:04:27PM -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > 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.

Too much context got snipped out, apparently. The question here is: what is
the advantage of having NetworkManager handle *static* addresses?

[...]
> 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.

Ok, so then we've got a hard sell coming up as NetworkManager becomes *the*
way for Fedora -- if the official line is that a major use case "probably
[doesn't] want to use NM" but it's incredibly difficult to do anything else,
I'm left shrugging and using my fallback line of "uh, yeah, that does kinda
suck. sorry about that, then."


> 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.

Clearly -- I'm totally with you there. Now that it actually works (thanks
very much, by the way!) on my laptop, I'm very glad for it.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>