initscripts

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 12:40 PM, Adam Williamson
<adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-01-25 at 08:49 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
>> * KVM bridge configuration
>
> Works fine in F21+, I'm using NM on both my main desktop/test box and
> my server VM host.

Testing now on a VM, with the Fedora 21 Workstation. Getting the gui's
to work after installation with the "Server" installation ISO than I
could spend, even after I brought in enough debris to get a GUI
screen.

I'll also point out that with either installation, it's unusably slow,
it's unusably slow as a VM on a 2 GHz server with a pretty good ATI
video card and 2 Gig of RAM allocated, so that makes testing awkward
for me. I can switch window managers to something remotely sane, but
then I lose the complex integration that makes the NetworkManager
configuration utilities available.

The modern anaconda tools and NetworkManager do indeed have access to
installation time configuration of tagged VLAN's and pair bonding,
although the interface is quite poor. Please refer to Eric Raymond's
old essay on "The Luxury of Ignorance" for guidelines on why it is so
poor, the lack of display of "what am I going to change from the
current status" is merely one of its many issues, and the lack of a
usable 'Help' key is pretty serious.

Bridges for KVM are not supported. What is apparent is that
NetworkManager supports 'DCB', data center bridging. That's a
different technology. And that puts us right into one of the
guidelines Eric added to his essay as a postscript:

         Are there settings you can do from the command line or
hand-editing config files that cannot be done from the GUI? Are they
documented anywhere? Does using the GUI erase these settings?

I have to admit that I remain pretty unhappy with NetworkManager. It's
a complex GUI on top of the underlying actual iinit scrupts, it
doesn't do a good job of exposing the available options and there's no
usable 'help' interface. Altogether, I'm afraid I have to classify it
as a "bad tool" and recommend strongly against it for producton use.
It's also partly why I try to put 'NM_CONTROLLED=no' in every
/etc/sysconfig/network for servers that I work with.