[Mageia-dev] Drakx-net or NetworkManager for Mageia 2

[Frank Griffin]

On 11/21/2011 03:15 PM, John Balcaen wrote:
> 2011/11/21 Frank Griffin<ftg at roadrunner.com>:
>> On 11/21/2011 02:14 PM, Marianne Lombard wrote:
>>> What will Mageia team do ? Continue to maintain and enhance drakx-net or
>>> follow all others distributions with NetworkManager ?
>> There are a number of serious problems with NM that have not, to my
>> knowledge, been dealt with.  It's particularly bad with wireless (which is
>> what Mageia tends to use it for the most); see bugs 856, 2160, 2416.
> Bug 856 is grub related so i guess we can forget this one ;o)

Sorry, I transposed - should have been 865.

> Bug 2416 was submitted when nm 0.9 (well beta) was not patched to
> support our sysvinit script, we'll still waiting for an answer of the
> initial report.

If you look at comment #6 in this bug, you'll see that this is another 
case of the same bug reported with NM in several other distros 
("disconnected for local ... (reason=3)).  I'm not sure what that would 
have to do with sysvinit script support.

> So 2160 is the only bug remaining here but i think it's probably the
> same bug aka it was reported when nm was not supporting sysvinit

Please explain about nm not supporting sysvinit, or point me to the 
relevant bug report.  2160 documented a case where the kernel reports a 
"no link beat detected" a second or so before reporting "link beat 
detected", and apparently NM sees the first and aborts trying to bring 
up the interface.  In the bug, I called this aggressive timeout, but it 
may just be that NM is misinterpreting the events it sees.

>>   Or
>> just google for NM problems (there's a ton of people having trouble with
>> it).
>>
>> One of the annoying things about it is that you can say "no" to it in the
>> ifcfg file, but it will try to handle the interface anyway.
> It's happening with the *current* networkmanager of with the beta when
> the patch was not applied because blino did fix the patch&  now nm
> respect the ifcfg- command line.

I'll be doing a fresh install on the laptop experiencing the problem in 
the next couple of days, and I'll check to see whether the problem(s) 
still occur(s).  Since no one ever posted to the bug report that it 
might be fixed, I've simply been removing the package whenever it gets 
reinstalled or on fresh installs.

I'll wait to do the test to say this for sure, but IIRC I would 
occasionally not notice that some urpmi --auto-update had reinstalled NM 
until the wireless stopped coming up, and this was well after seeing 
your posts about blino's patch.

>>   And if you look
>> in bug 2160, it appears that we have no maintainer for it.
> Well there's a lot of packages without maintainer ...
>

Well, if we're considering doing something that has the potential of 
breaking peoples' systems, it would make sense (at least to me) to tread 
carefully unless we have someone on hand that can deal with the 
problems, no ?