[CentOS] Disappearing Network Manager config scripts

Timothy Murphy gayleard at eircom.net
Wed Apr 30 14:57:37 UTC 2014


Lamar Owen wrote:

> My experience?  There is no such thing as a 100% stable networking
> environment.

I agree that WiFi networking is difficult,
but ethernet networking, in my experience, is 99.9% stable.
I wish NM would just stick to WiFi.

> NetworkManager is well-documented.

Where?
I haven't come across any documents that explain clearly
how NM is meant to be working, or eg what documents it is reading.

> It also logs to /var/log/messages in plain text, too.

I find the NM messages on /var/log/messages ludicrously verbose;
and even after wading through these messages it is difficult to determine
exactly what is wrong.
In my view NM should spend a little time trying to make these messages
more helpful.

> NetworkManager's goal is extremely simple, and is in the README. It's
> simply: "NetworkManager attempts to keep an active network connection
> available at all times."  Networks are unreliable. Period.

WiFi networks are unreliable - in fact if you study the algorithms involved
it is almost a miracle (in my view) that they work at all.
Ethernet networks exchange packets in a completely different way,
and are very reliable, and also easy to understand.

> Older does not mean better, and many times newer things have to be tried
> out first to see if they are, or aren't, better.  Systemd is one of
> these things, and it will be interesting to see how that all plays out
> over the next few years.

Personally, I see the advantages of systemd.
But not nearly enough trouble has been taken, in my view,
to make it simple to use.
Just the fact that one has to type more characters to get to the same place
(eg "systemctl start whatever.service" in place of "service whatever start")
shows a lack of consideration for users.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland





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