starting Fedora Server SIG

[Bill Nottingham]

Chris Adams (cmadams at hiwaay.net) said: 
> > How is NM-dispatcher a developer service? Similarly, nm-tool is
> > at least quicker than 'ip addr ls ; ip route ls ; cat /etc/resolv.conf'.
> 
> Funny; when I opened my notebook just now, hald segfaulted and died and
> NM died for some unknown reason.  Because of that, nm-tool was useless,
> but ifconfig still worked.

And I tried to update yesterday and yum failed, but RPM still worked.
So yum is obviously useless for a user environment, and just extra code
that gets in the way.

(Not that I actually believe that, but there's a fallacy here of
conflating anecdotes and the existence of bugs with 'never use this'.)

Frankly, the part of this discussion that confuses me is the insistence
that "NetworkManager is not useful for some server-based configs" yields
the conclusion that "NetworkManager is not useful for any server-based
configs" (complete with FUD about what it actually supports doing, which
is a lot of this thread as well.) And it's not just NetworkManager that
this applies to - the same discussion came up in this thread about
encrypted filesystems.

In fact, here's a list of things that I've had server admins complain
about, with respect to 'bloat', or 'added code', or 'functionality that
I don't need, why is it installed' at one point or another over the
past few years.

- NetworkManager
- Encrypted filesystems
- udev
- Administration utilities using python (or perl, or ruby, or...)
- yum (as a corollary to the above, and other reasons)
- Kerberos authentication support, and krb5-libs dependencies
- cyrus-sasl library dependencies
- LDAP library dependencies
- X11 libraries
- I'd like an administration desktop, but why GNOME instead of
  xfce/lxde/fvwm/twm
- puppet/cfengine/etc.
- fontconfig
- UTF-8 support
- I don't like having this binary installed! It's over 1MB in size!

Heck, if you go back far enough, people complained about why PAM
needed to be added. And I'm sure I'm missing others. It gets to a point
where the only solution that would seem to be able to placate all the
diverse admin users would be to never change anything, and we could
just ship the equivalent of Slackware 3.2 with security fixes and go home.

Of course, if we actually did that, then each disparate group would then
complain about not including whichever of those features above they
*did* care about, and no one would be happy.

Sorry... on to your other question...

> How would a system admin even configure NM?  Where do I go to add an
> alias, a new route, or a new GRE tunnel?

The ifcfg files, or the network manager config tool. (GRE isn't
supported yet.)

> How is a daemon (or set of daemons) useful for a static configuration
> that does not change?  For the vast majority of my servers, the network
> config is set in the kickstart %post and not touched for the life of the
> server (which is typically many years; I've got a RHEL 3 server that
> hasn't had a network change since Feb 2004 for example).

I tried to give some examples above, such as ways to give notification
to other apps/services when network devices go up and down that don't
rely on them catching SIGIO and then trying to guess what happened.
(That's the notification mechanism currently provided by the initscripts.)
While it may not be useful for all service cases, it certainly can
be useful for some.

Bill