On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 10:25 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 01:04:43AM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote: > > The pluses are that: > > - it should be able to boot up faster (note the should) > > Because of delaying network initialization, or something else? I'm generally > not interested in boot time per se except in the sense of > time-to-fully-operational. (For machines with static addresses -- this isn't > the laptop case.) If you have a wired interface marked for DHCP, but no cable plugged in, and ONBOOT=yes, the network service will block waiting until the DHCP timeout. In general, you want connections to come up as they become available. > > - it informs applications that you're connected to the network (say, you > > unplug the network, the router dies, or the driver for your network card > > drops you off the network) > > I can see this being handy in some cases, but mostly, the network status of > statically-configured machines is generally best monitored externally. > > > - and finally, it will allow routing over multiple connections in the > > future (so static wired, and wireless routed over the wired, or all the > > wired routed over a WWAN in case your internet connection breaks). > > This can be done already with static configuration, but if it makes an > auto-fallback easy to configure that does seem like a plus -- but very > special purpose. > > > C'mon, seriously, is that all you've got? :) > > The real major plus I see is: "It's good for the desktop, so doing it on > servers means it all works the same." But that's kind of a hard sell -- and > since in many cases I end up the one _making_ the sell, I'd like something > more to work with. Many of the features of NetworkManager do make life easier on desktops and aren't as useful on a server machine. So if you're just interested in servers, the story shouldn't be any different with NM than with the 'network' service, except that NM provides a single source for information about the network that programs can query. If you're using a single ethernet adapter, statically configured, without a desktop, and only running say httpd and samba, then no, you probably don't want to use NM. You certainly _could_ if you wanted to. If we're talking about GUIs, or more mobile machines like laptops or mobile internet devices, or desktops in general, or multi-user systems where finer-grained control of network devices is desired, then I can list more advantages of NetworkManager. Dan -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
