starting Fedora Server SIG

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 13:13 -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
>> I agree with the desire to maintain only one tool. However, NM is
>> extremely desktop oriented, and there seems to include no hint of an
>> intention to support the complex setups that are possible with the old
>> ifcfg infra.
>
> Really?  Most of the work over the past couple of years in NM seems to
> be aimed at trying to support these cases as opposed to just the
> "simple" desktop case

That's odd -- I've never seen any of it. Are there good examples of
how you configure a server to do special stuff with it? Or a
'scripting network-manager' guide somewhere?

> The NetworkManager dispatcher stuff has existed forever and is all about
> scripting.  Not necessarily pre-interface bringup, but post.  And
> depending on scripting slows things down and makes it a lot harder to
> have a deterministic view of what's been done.

Network-related events happen very seldom -- so scripting is a good
fit. My ifup/ifdown experience is not dominated by bash startup time.

> And rather than focusing on nm-tool and exactly what it exposes, it's
> probably more interesting to look at the dbus interfaces/daemon
> capabilities.  Yes, I'll be one of the first to say it's painful to
> write code interacting with dbus :-) -- but, it is very flexible and

And
 - it's very far removed from the stuff that a unix sysadmin deals with
 - it forces me to have a script running to listen to dbus events :-/

 > then as what the real use cases that people care about become clearer,
> it's easier to write very lean, very specific tools to do what they need
> as long as the backend and dbus interfaces are sufficient

I'm keen on learning more about the hooks and scriptability, mostly
thinking of desktop cases. From a server perspective, running the nm
daemon _plus_ running a daemon of my own to listen to dbus events...
is not a winning proposition.

If the API design of NM is better laid out to do things in a more
deterministic way, then great, let's learn those tricks and apply them
to a solution that doesn't require fat daemons spinning in the bg all
the time (running as root!), and that can hopefully be implemented in
shell scripts or something similar.

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff