On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 3:14 PM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote: > > >> What part of the breakage that NetworkManager does is good for a >> wired, static-addressed server? > > If you disable NM, the network configuration GUI stops working in EL7. (I didn’t do much with EL6, but I thought its GUI had a fall-back for the non-NM case.) > > We don’t need this GUI, but our semi-technical customers sometimes do. It can be the difference between rolling a truck to a remote site vs letting the on-site people take care of the problem. But can't you still set NM_CONTROLLED=no on an interface? >> you should be able to ssh to some other box on the working network, > > I did mention that these sites rarely have local staff who know Linux. You can correctly infer from that there *are* no other SSH servers, just ours. > > These are K-12 schools, for the most part. They often don’t have technical staff on-site at all. We have to schedule time with overworked district-level staff who often only know Windows to get anything at this level done. > We’ve built up nasty hacks to solve this before; VPN -> RDP -> PuTTY -> Linux server, for instance. Getting protective network admins to allow all this can chew up weeks of time. I'm way too familiar with the problem - but we usually have several boxes in one place. > It’s far, far better if the Linux box just phones home with the info we need to fix it. It can cut a 4-week phone tag game down to 15 minutes. I've done some weird stuff like scripts that bring up all the interfaces, look for link, apply one of the IPs that the box should have to one of the interfaces with link up, try to ping the gateway, lather, rinse, repeat, but I've never been happy with any of it. Maybe a USB wifi adapter could be set up to make an openvpn connection back to a home server if you know the location has wifi. That could give you a known private IP to connect to for the rest of the configuration. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com