Network Manager

[Andrew Jorgensen]

On 2/17/06, Scott James Remnant <keybuk at gmail.com> wrote:
>      We therefore decided that it would be best if Network Manager
> ignored interfaces completely if they were "manually configured" in
> /etc/network/interfaces.  This means you need to remove the
> configuration for them before you can use NM with them.  While this
> has an initial configuration difficulty, the general experience once
> configured is nicer.

Scott,  I have been wondering for some time if this could be solved
better by allowing a syntax like

iface eth1 inet nm

or something like that in /etc/network/interfaces.  It seems like the
intent of the original syntax is to say who an interface is to be
controlled by (static or dhcp) so it would be appropriate to allow it
to be controlled by nm as well (which will use dhcp, but that's not
the point here).

>     Currently however this patch has resulted in Network Manager
> simply not knowing about such interfaces, and it'll claim that no
> interfaces are configured when it should at least show the status of
> the configured interface and not allow changing of them.  I intend to
> improve this if possible before release.

Regarding this wouldn't it be best if nm could be aware of all
available interfaces but not control them automatically unless they
are configured to be under nm's control?  Then it would be possible
for the user to instruct nm to take control over the interface without
having to restart things or muck with configs.  That might not meet
all the requirements of the original spec, but I think it would
improve the experience.  It would also allow nm to be installed and
active even if you are statically configured, which would allow us to
install it by default rather than make the user choose to install it.

Thanks for the excellent work!

Cheers,
Andrew Jorgensen