Interviews/DanWilliams

NetworkManager
GNU/Linux systems have often come under attack for the difficulty involved with setting-up and configuring various wireless devices. Thanks to Network Manager during the Fedora 8 release cycle the developers are ready to deliver some incredible new features, including ad-hoc networking, multiple active devices and internet connection sharing. To find out more we talked with Dan Williams, Fedora project member and Network Manager 0.7 included. What were the benefits of doing this for Fedora 8?'''

Dan Williams: The point of including NM 0.7 in F8 was current and future functionality. The big thing we did with 0.7 was to rewrite the configuration interface to be much more flexible, specifically to allow things users wanted like:


 * static IPs, multiple IPs per interface
 * connections before login (just landed)
 * multiple active devices
 * internet connection sharing
 * mobile broadband card and better PPP support

None of this is really possible with 0.6.x, and where some of it is (dial-up connections) it's an ugly inflexible hack. We tried to match feature parity of Network Manager has brought additional functionality to users of F8.

'''Presumably, with the rewritten architecture in 0.7 and Fedora 8, there are now a lot of possibilities for what can be achieved with Network Manager-specific improvements should also land in F8 as updates, simply because we pushed to get NM 0.7 into F8 in the first place.

'''To me, ad-hoc networking and connection sharing sound like particularly exciting benefits - would you like to talk about these a bit?'''

Dan Williams: These depend on multiple active devices, of course. NM supports three device types right now, mobile broadband cards, wired, and wifi. Ideally you'll be able to share any of these connections with any one other connection.

So you bring up your mobile broadband card and tell NM to share that connection over wireless. NM might create a new Ad-Hoc wireless network, get an automatic IPv4 address, set up NAT, and advertise itself as a router for other wireless clients like Mac OS X does. Magic.

'''Is Network Kit to allow for system-wide configuration changes from nm-applet, will this replace system-config-network?'''

Dan Williams: I expect it will replace system-config-network for a large class of users. I don't expect NM will soon replace advanced networking use cases like bonding, vlans, or really complex routing configuration. There's enough work to make NM solid without irresponsibly expanding its use-cases to things we can't yet handle well. At some point I'd like to see ifup/ifdown poke NM to do the right thing instead of running a pile of shell.

'''KDE 4 is shaping up to be a major feature, for all the next major distribution releases, yet K Manager hasn't been functioning with Network Network Network Office.org Mac port after that, helping to release the first usable, packaged version for Mac OS X. I got hired by Red Hat originally to work on Open Manager :)  I sometimes suck it up in various Half-Life-based games (CS, TF, DoD, etc) as 'fa'.