starting Fedora Server SIG

[Seth Vidal]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Dan Williams wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 17:10 -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 14 Nov 2008, Jeremy Katz wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Also, there's this weird "running daemons are bad" mentality which I'm
>>> not really sure what the right way to approach is.  But it's one that
>>> I'm not sure how true it is in our current world of increasingly moving
>>> functionality out of the kernel and into userspace in which case you
>>> have to have something running in addition to the kernel.
>>>
>>> Maybe to try some examples -- irqbalance is a daemon and not in the
>>> kernel anymore[1], does that make it "not useful"?  Or for another side,
>>> various kernel threads are really just daemons... maybe we shouldn't run
>>> them either?
>>>
>>
>> if you replace useful with necessary in his argument I think it ends up
>> making more sense.
>>
>> If the daemon is not NECESSARY for the task it is fulfilling then why have
>> it running?
>
> So I guess it boils down to how you define "task" then...

Actually it boils down to what the task is.

If the task is:
  - setup ip/bcast/network
  - setup default route
  - setup static route

(which is the task on a MASSIVE number of server systems)

Then everything else is unnecessary to have running.

If the task is to deal with complicated dhcp and wireless configurations, 
multiple and complicated vpn configurations and notify the 
console/desktop user about all of these things (which a lot of laptops 
fall into that category) then NM is extremely useful and I'd argue 
necessary for a convenient computing experience.

-sv