systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 27, 2012 3:33 UTC (Fri) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739)
In reply to: systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits by jimparis
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Quality has a new name

The good and the bad of NM. NM makes setting up VPN's etc on my laptop easy, but it interferes horribly when doing anything moderately serverish like setting up VLAN's, bridging, bonding, fiddling with devices. I.e all the things you hope a network developer tests. So yes for users it's great but for developers it is a nuisance.

I fear systemd will end up the same way. Kind of like the Apple IOS, when everything works its wonderful, but when you want to develop hardware support or run another OS, or have a hardware error, it just says "your not worthy" and spits in your face.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 27, 2012 22:06 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (6 responses)

Setting up the VPN is easy, but NM fails at something I used to have scripts doing: getting name service set properly.

I *used* to run a caching named with forwarding servers defined for the internal nameservers on remote networks. The scripts would set the reference to the server and reconfig named.

To do the same thing on NetworkManager I'd have to write a plugin. Considering the state of other NM plugins, the NM authors have zero concern for API compatibility and therefore I'd also have to rewrite the code every six months or so.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 27, 2012 22:14 UTC (Fri) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (5 responses)

A plugin might be overkill. Is putting your scripts in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d not sufficient? It seems that you would just have to check that the interface coming up is your VPN, and then do your named config magic as usual.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 28, 2012 1:45 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

by plugin do you mean a script networkmanager's dispatcher.d facilility that fires on network up/down?

i just want to be clear as to what you have attempted.

-jef

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 28, 2012 2:29 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

replying to myself... somehow i punched the wrong comment to reply to and i was too late to be relevant anyways. Please ignore me.. just this once.

-jef

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 28, 2012 21:02 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

I just looked around at the man pages and http://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager

Do you realize the dispatch stuff isn't documented anywhere?

Besides that, NM makes it quite difficult to use DHCP and still point the DNS at ::1.

Which seems to be why someone wrote the dns=plugin stuff that is in the NetworkManager configuration file.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted Apr 29, 2012 0:44 UTC (Sun) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (1 responses)

> Do you realize the dispatch stuff isn't documented anywhere?

On my system, it's the majority of the "Description" section in "man networkmanager". See http://linux.die.net/man/8/networkmanager

> Besides that, NM makes it quite difficult to use DHCP and still point the DNS at ::1.

Under your IPv4 or IPv6 settings tab, just set the "method" to "Automatic (DHCP) addresses only" or "Automatic, addresses only". Then fill in the DNS servers yourself.

systemd & the tightly couple core band vs a world of many inits

Posted May 1, 2012 6:50 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Hmm. Sure enough, it is there in the Description section. I never saw it. I probably skipped Description in order to get to the good stuff. It seems to me that most man pages put a description in Description and then the actually useful information in other sections.

Or it is possible that I was logged into a CentOS 5 system when I ran the man command. NetworkManager 0.7 (the RHEL 5 version) has a dispatcher.d directory, but nothing in the man page about it. And this time I double-checked.