On Sun, 22 Aug 2004, Havoc Pennington wrote: > BTW, when using NetworkManager for desktops, do we really need network- > scripts and sysconfig/networking at all? > > It feels to me like many problems I've had with networking have come > down to the fact that the configuration is in multiple places: > modprobe.conf, hwconf, network-scripts, sysconfig/networking; > it doesn't seem that well-defined how it all works... maybe I'm just > dense though. > > One policy we might try to get closer to: clearly split autogenerated > information from manually-edited information, and machine-readable > information from human-only information such as scripts. NetworkManager doesn't really care what the interfaces are named of course, so that problem should be solved. I can see two problems with skipping the config stuff in network-scripts and sysconfig-networking: 1) kernel module autoloading. Current process: /etc/rc.d/init.d/network loads the kernel modules itself by reading sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* and reading the device, then asks modprobe (which reads modprobe.conf) what the device name is, then has modprobe load it. NetworkManager process: asks hal for network devices. Unfortunately, hal doesn't know that a device is network device until its kernel module is loaded, which never happens. So we have to keep the ifcfg-* stuff around until we start autoloading kernel modules when the device is present (which sounds just fine to me). 2) NetworkManager will eventually have to deal with static IP information, which means we need the stuff like IP, gateway, DNS, and perhaps YP information which has to get stored somewhere, and is currently in the ifcfg-* files. Dan
