starting Fedora Server SIG

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Thu Nov 13 21:47:31 UTC 2008


Chris Adams (cmadams at hiwaay.net) said: 
> That gets back to my previous question: why would I want one or more
> daemons required for a static server configuration?  That is just more
> things to break.

Things NM gives you, as part of having that daemon (note: may not be
relevant to all usage cases, including desktops, servers, etc.):

- Consistently queryable for all various network settings, via dbus
  (as opposed to the conglomeration of ifconfig, ip, route, iwconfig,
  and 'cat <config file here>')
- Better scriptability of actions when you join and leave networks,
  links go up and down, etc. (netreport is not a good interface.)
- Support for both user-specific and system-wide configurations
- Sane WPA, mobile broadband, etc. support

This is above and beyond the GUI-related stuff, such as easily
switching between wireless networks, connection sharing, etc.

> We already have udev, dbus, hald, and console-kit (I
> have an F9 firewall where something starts console-kit; I don't know
> what or why) for example, without any good docs about which can be
> disabled and when; please don't add NM.

So, I'm not really sure what you mean here by 'we already have
udev'... after all, having device nodes is good. udev is also
the mechanism to load drivers on startup, which is obviously a
system requirement. It also provides a mechanism to run commands
on device initialization at startup, so it's used for things like
setting the clock, configuring the console, etc.

D-Bus is a systemwide IPC bus. It's not exactly interesting on its
own, but it's an underlying detail. The short answer is "if things
you need are linked against the dbus libraries, don't turn off
the daemon."

HAL is an interface for querying available hardware over the system;
it runs on top of d-bus. It's used by things like NetworkManager
and anaconda to enumerate devices, and by the desktop systems as the
underlying framework for handling PDAs, music players, hotpluggable
and removable devices, etc. It's also what parcels out suspend/resume
quirks for the pm-utils framework to read and use, and what's used
by X.org to detect input devices.

ConsoleKit is a d-bus available daemon that tracks 'sessions' (the
combination of a login and a 'seat' - a display/keyboard/mouse combo.)
It's done that way because just trawling through utmp isn't the most
reliable mechanism. It's used by GDM for tracking who's logged in and
providing shutdown/restart functionalty, and by HAL for implementing
device access for users logged in on the console.

Bill




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