NetworkManager, is it important?

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 2010-04-26 at 09:33 -0500, Dale Dellutri wrote: 

                On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Gergely Buday <gbuday at gmail.com> wrote:
        
        > yesterday I configured my fedora 12 box. With NetworkManager I could
        > not make it to have network after boot. At last I removed
        > NetworkManager and createad an S07network link in /etc/rc5.d to
        > /etc/init.d/network. It worked - good old Unix wisdom. With
        > NetworkManager there was even the problem that after manually starting
        > network Firefox switched to offline mode - an annoying problem that my
        > users cannot manage.
        >
        > What do I miss if I do not have NetworkManager? In what circumstances
        > do I need it _really_ ?
        >
        
        I have F12 running on my personal laptop (Dell D630) and my work desktop.
        I think that NM is appropriate and useful on my laptop  but not my desktop.
        
        When I use my laptop at home, I connect to my home network via WiFi,
        and sometimes I used a wired connection.  I've used both wired and
        wireless connections elsewhere.  So far, NM has correctly connected in
        all these situations, using DHCP.

You need NetworkManager if you connect to wireless networks that
authenticate with WPA.  The old-style network scripts don't handle that
case.  It can be handled using wpa_supplicant manually, but it is far
less convenient.  
        
        My work desktop, however, has a wired connection with a fixed IP address.
        In this case, NM is not useful.  So I did (as root):
        
          service NetworkManager off
          chkconfig NetworkManager off
        
        Then I modified /etc/resolv.conf and
        /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0,
        and I created /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/route-eth0 (for a special route
        we need at work), and then
        
          chkconfig network on
          service network start
        
        I think that I could have also use config tools in Gnome to do the same
        thing, but the above worked for me.
        
        The usefulness of NM depends on your network setup.


If you're one of those that turned NM off in the early days of its
development, when it only did user-based connections should be aware
that it now handles system-wide connection options, works with mobile
broadband, manages DSL connections, starts and stops your VPNs, connects
at boot, allows editing connections, and in F13 will even have a CLI.  

It's pretty clear that the old network scripts are deprecated and NM is
the future of Linux networking, at least for Fedora and Red Hat.

-- 
                Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs