network-manager lacks configuration params

[Hadmut Danisch]

Binary package hint: network-manager

Hi,

when moving from manual ifup/down configuration to network-manager when testing jaunty beta I ran into several shortcomings of network-manager (compared to ifup-down)

* there are no pre-up/post-down scripts run (this is bug #336736)

* network-manager does not tell, which configuration was chosen (e.g. the name of the network configuration),
  like ifup/down does when running the scripts. Should pass this as a third parameter or as an environment
  variable (and forward to the /etc/network/ifup.d.. scripts)

* with /etc/network/interfaces you can pass additional arbitrary parameters (i.e. environment variables) to
   the scripts run, where network-manager lacks this ability

* ifup/down supports a feature like script-driven selection of the configuration, e.g. with guessnet, which allows
  automatic selection of the network configuration, depending where you are (e.g. by trying arp requests)

regards
Hadmut

[Hadmut Danisch (hadmut)]

Additional comment: Plenty of packages add their own scripts to /etc/network/if-*.d e.g. to set nameservers, dns-search paths and things like that. These are all broken when using network-manager due to the lack to set configuration variables.

Network-manager should mimic the ifup/down as much as possible to keep the other debian/ubuntu packages running.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I can't do anything but close this bug report as "Invalid", this is not a bug but a design decision. There are other facilities available to provide a similar functionality (/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d) which also runs some of the ifupdown scripts, and we have some support of the most common hooks to ifupdown when running NetworkManager is managed more. Running normally, NetworkManager *will* (and that's expected and wanted behavior) ignore the devices configured in /etc/network/interfaces.