> 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). Not fine to a lot of servers, though. Sometimes you have multiple nics in a machine and you don't want certain ones even coming up if you can avoid it. Maybe they're a heartbeat backup nic or maybe they're an onboard nic that plays hell with your bios. It doesn't matter, simply loading a driver b/c the device is in the machine will piss off a lot of people who appreciate being able to control what their system does. -sv
