network-manager problems

[Thomas Hood]

This is to warn people who are experimenting with network-manager
not to install the latest release, version 0.4.1+cvs20050618-3.
It does not start.

    https://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13070

In order to get to the point where I could discover that it does
not start I had to do some hacking.

1. The previous version of network-manager Depended on bind9.
On my system that resulted in two instances of named running,
one started by init and one by NetworkManager.  The new
version of network-manager Depends on dnsmasq instead of
bind9.  On upgrading network-manager, the installation of
dnsmasq failed because the dnsmasq daemon could not start;
it could not start because named was still running and had
bound the required socket.  In order to solve this I purged
bind9 and rebooted.

There is actually no need for network-manager to Depend on
dnsmasq.  This may be desirable as an installation default,
but if network-manager uses resolvconf properly then the
system will work properly with dnsmasq, bind9, pdnsd, nscd
or with none of the above or with combinations of them.

2. network-manager Depends on resolvconf.  Resolvconf creates
a symlink /etc/resolv.conf -> /etc/resolvconf/run/resolv.conf
when it is installed.  The previous version of network-manager
deleted this symlink and replaced it with a file.  The new
version of network-manager reportedly makes use of resolvconf
and so the symlink should be present.  If you are upgrading
from the previous version of network-manager then you should
either put the symlink back by hand or run
"dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf".

I have prepared a new version of resolvconf (1.32) which will
reduce the number of notifications that occur when a local
caching nameserver is installed.  This will work better in
combination with network-manager and should be included in
Ubuntu when it becomes available in Debian.
-- 
Thomas Hood