network manager has gone crazy

[lee]

Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:44:04 +0100 lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>> Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> writes:
>> > There does appear to be some NetworkManager interface through the
>> > command line.  Dunno whether it's going to be of any use to you,
>> > though.
>> 
>> Hm I didn't find out what it is yet.
>
> man nmcli
> man nm-tool
> man nm-online
> man NetworkManager
> man NetworkManager.conf

Ah, thank you, I'll look at them :)

Seems like it's even worse than I thought, considering this
inconsistancy in the naming.  It would have to be NMcli, etc. ...

> If you prefer a GUI to control NetworkManager, you probably want to
>
>   yum install NetworkManager-gnome
>
> and start nm-applet utility, which should land in your
> system-tray/dock/whatever, and from where you can do everything else.

Hm I don't have a tray or dock, never found that useful.  I've got
iconbox in fvwm because the icons need to go /somewhere/ where I can
find them, and it keeps getting in the way.  I3 has a better solution to
that ... thinking of which, maybe it's possible to configure fvwm to
have the same ...

>> > As may have been pointed out in this thread, but definitely in the
>> > past, NetworkManager is probably not be suitable for servers.  It
>> > is geared towards having something else configure your network,
>> > usually a server is self-configured, or at least the central server
>> > is (the one everything else relies on).
>> 
>> It's a very strange idea that something else should configure the
>> network.
>
> Why do you consider such a scenario to be strange?

It just feels strange, and I've seen it not working.

> The dhcp was
> invented for precisely this purpose. It is widely used on laptops and
> other mobile devices, in home&office environments for desktops, etc.
>
> Typically only servers need to have a static IP. And even that can be
> remote-configured by the dhcp server. In fact, the dhcp server itself
> is the only one requiring a static manually-configured IP. Everything
> else can be configured by a remote dhcp server.

DHCP has its advantages and disadvantages ...

>> Anyway, I still want to know, even with networkmanager disabled.  It
>> doesn't hurt to learn something new :)
>> 
>> > I have to admit I'm intrigued to find out what would happen if you
>> > ran a DHCP server on a machine with NetworkManager handling the
>> > network interfaces.  But not sufficiently to try it out, at 2:30 in
>> > the morning.
>> 
>> It probably won't work because there won't be any network interfaces
>> configured the DHCP server could use to receive broadcasts and send
>> answers so that networkmanager could configure such interfaces.
>
> The dhcp server requires a NIC with a static IP (it cannot serve
> itself). If NetworkManager is configured so that it assigns a static IP
> to that particular interface, dhcp will be happy, and everything will
> work well.
>
> It can even serve the IPs for other NICs on the same machine (if any
> are present), and NetworkManager will pick those up and configure
> them, if they are set up to use dhcp... ;-)

And you neither need networkmanager, nor DHPC when you just configure
static IPs :)

>> > Regarding trying to find its configuration files, I would have tried
>> > something like:  locate -i networkmanager |grep etc
>
> I doubt that in normal circumstances one would ever need to manually
> edit files in /etc/NetworkManager/. All configuration files that are
> related to the actual network interfaces (used by NM) are
> in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/, among which the most interesting
> are the ifcfg-* files. Those are probably the only files that one could
> be motivated to hand-edit. At least in normal circumstances, and in
> the absence of a GUI utility.

Well I did edit the ifcfg-* files, and networkmananger didn't agree and
destroyed /etc/resolv.conf.  Now I could say that networkmanager should
be able to detect when someone edits the relevant files and act
accordingly.  A simple flag-entry like "nm-touch: [yes | no]" in
resolv.conf might help a lot already; it could even be in form of a
comment which only networkmanager understands so it doesn't interfere
with anything else that uses the file.

It would still be a very ugly solution ... It would be better if the
installer gave you a choice whether to use networkmanager or not.  I
guess they need to fix the dependencies of it first ...

What is the procedure to make suggestions like that?  Create a bug
report for networkmanager?


-- 
Fedora 17