network vs NetworkManger services ??

[Tim]

Jeff Spaleta:
>> You continue to confuse yourself.  NM does most of what it does
>> automatically. 

William Case:
> In computers, nothing does most of what it does automagically.

I wish people would stop using that bogus term.  Apart from it being a
stupid word, there's nothing "magic" about it, at all.  What Jeff said
was "automatically".  The system (i.e. the whole thing, both client and
server, in combination) sorts itself out, according to how it's
designed.  That's "automatic".  There's no more *magic* involved here
than there is in automatic transmission cars.  It does what it does in
the way that it's been engineered to work.

Getting back to network manager, there's two basic ways you can expect
it to sort out a network, that work fairly well at the moment:

1. If you have a DHCP server on the network, then *IT* will configure
your network, "automatically".  There's no client-side
user-configuration involved with that, the server holds the
configuration data.  Yes, it is possible for a DHCP client to have
overriding local configuration, but network manager doesn't seem to
support it, and that sort of thing's a kludge to try and get around
problems with badly set up DHCP servers, which would be better sorted
out by reconfiguring the server.

2. If you have no DHCP server, then there's the zeroconf (aka bonjour or
link-local) scheme, where each client assigns itself a unique IP, at
random, after first checking that nobody else on the same LAN is already
using that address.  Again, there's no real client-side configuration
for this, it's "automatic".

Neither of those methods should really have users trying to diddle the
network configuration manually.  If you want to manually configure
things, then stop using automatic configuration systems, completely.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686

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