Network configuration future

[Olaf Kirch]

Hi Stephen,

On Wednesday 29 August 2012 19:48:29 Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> Olaf, I'm very interested to learn more about wicked. Can you perhaps
> itemize the set of features available to wicked (current as well as
> in-development) that aren't available (or maybe "accessible) in Network
> Manager?

Hm, let me see - this is going to be a bit tough :)

Currently, wicked supports wired Ethernet, VLANs, bridges, bonds, wireless
(no EAP mode yet, though), openvpn, and to some degree GSM modems. For
most of these, the set of properties accessible exceeds those of
NetworkManager by far.

In terms of address configuration, it supports dhcp4 and dhcp6, as well as
IPv4 zeroconf (in addition to static and ipv6 autoconf). You can mix addrconf
modes (eg configure a NIC with DHCPv4 plus two static routes).

The layered approach tries to decouple the settings of each layer. For
instance, you can take down the DHCPv6 agent and bring up the DHCPv4
agent on an interface without having to cycle it completely. Same for
adding a bridge port, or removing one NIC from a bond, or for changing
the offload parameters on an Eth device.

> I'm involved in a project that's aiming to improve central management of
> networking and having a comprehensive network stack wrapped in a D-BUS
> API sounds almost too good to be true from that perspective. A CIM
> wrapper around such an API could go a long way in that direction.

Yes, I had been thinking of something like this as well.

> Do you have a D-BUS API specification available somewhere in a readable
> form? That would be very helpful.

Hm, not "readable" in the sense of nice HTML. There's a schema definition
in the source code which hopefully goes a long way to give you an idea of
how it works.

Olaf
-- 
Neo didn't bring down the Matrix. SOA did. (soafacts.com)
--------------------------------------------
Olaf Kirch - Director SUSE Linux Enterprise; R&D (okir at suse.com)
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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