initscripts

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2015-01-27 at 14:50 -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> 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.

I'd also point out that there are three different NetworkManager GUIs,
and one TUI:

1) GNOME Shell network settings - not really targeted for server
environments, has a smaller set of options that are suitable for
desktop/workstation use-cases

2) nm-connection-editor - presents a larger set of options than #1, and
only modifies *saved configuration*, not runtime configuration.  eg, it
is basically a much more capable system-config-network but without the
"up/down" buttons

3) KDE's network configuration dialogs

4) nmtui - a slightly simpler version of nm-connection-editor intended
for GUI-less environments, like a more capable system-config-network-tui

#2 and #4 obviously run much better in desktop environments like LXDE,
XFCE, etc where the full GNOME stack is not available.

It's important to note which one you're talking about when suggesting
improvements, since they are developed by different projects and each
one has a different target audience.  That said, I understand it can be
confusing which one is for who and available where...

Dan

> 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.