NetworkManager use cases (was: Re: Fedora 7)
On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 03:54:17PM +0100, Olivier Galibert wrote:
Even on laptops you can have fun scenarios, for instance I've
more
than once used my laptop which was connected to an hotel's internet
through ethernet as a wifi relay for my SO's laptop. So don't forget
ad-hoc wifi connections, masquerading and forwarding ;-)
Yep. I have fun scenarios
on laptops all the time
Wireless is usually the way out, and when I plug something into the
wired port it's often just a point-to-point connection to some device that
I need to talk to. Some times there might be a dhcp/tftp server running on
that interface (so, say I can do a PXE network install of my laptop),
That or I want to transfer a file fast from some machine on the wired
network over GigE, some times configuring the interface manually, some times
with DHCP.
Since this happens pretty regularly, I can't really use NM. + bugzilla
#209009 + something bad with NM & aironet scanning, so it only sees one AP
for a long time after resuming the laptop (iwlist eth1 scan shows
everything. Not sure if it's actually an applet thing, if I manually
tell it to join a network that works fine.
Maybe some command line scripts for controlling NM would be useful.
nm-join-network <network> <wep key (optional, should look in the keyring too if
that's available)>
and it'd then try very hard to connect to that network.
nm-freeze-config and it'd stop trying to change the network config even if I
plug/unplug a cable.
Well, those are my use cases, probably pretty rare in general, but it's
what I need personally ;)
Well ok, occasionally there's the need for having an ad-hoc wlan + sharing
a GPRS/3G bluetooth connection. Typically requiring some RTFM to figure
out what the iptables masquerade syntax was again :) I would love some
connection sharing configuration thingy. Outside the scope of NM, sure,
but if NM is to be the way to configure all network devices at some point,
such an application should interact well with it :)
--
Pekka Pietikainen