SummerOfCode/2006/TimNiemueller

= NetworkManager Dialup Support =


 * Student: TimNiemueller
 * Assigned Mentor: JeremyKatz

Hello Google, hello Fedora Project.

I would like to add support for PPP dialup connections (including Modem, ISDN, DSL, GPRS via Bluetooth and mobile) to the NetworkManager (NM). This project was mentioned on the Fedora Bounties page (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraBounties#head-6a7344d0d65f7dcb20589497bbd924b71f31d8ce).

NetworkManager is a great tool to manage network connections but lacks in-depth support at the moment for dialup connections (currently it can show connections that been created with a distro-specific tool and can start them, but it cannot monitor its status or stop the connections). My work would be to develop the infrastructure in NM to allow adding support for multiple different kinds of PPP connections to NM (backend) and to add as many kinds of these connections as possible in that time, with a basic set of at least modem and DSL. Another very interesting goal is to allow GPRS connections via Bluetooth and a mobile phone. This needs some extra code to handle Bluetooth pairing as well so it has to be investigated if this can be done in time. A GUI has to be integrated into the nm-applet Gnome-Frontend of NM (frontend). It has to allow creating and editing connections as well as status monitoring of the connection. There are currently two possible ways known of integrating PPP connections, by either using smpppd or a pppd plugin to allow communication with pppd via dbus. Part of the project would be to evaluate both approaches (and maybe other approaches as they appear during research) and discuss with the mentor which way to go. At the end of this project the code will be supplied as a patch-set to the then-current NM CVS version ready for inclusion.

Some background about me: I'm a student of computer science at the RWTH Aachen University, Germany. I'm going to write my master thesis by the end of the year and I'm an active member of the local RoboCup (robot soccer) team (http://robocup.rwth-aachen.de) where I wrote the vision system for the robots. I have already contributed to the NM project by adding a plugin for OpenVPN connections and by committing some smaller patches throughout the code. On my homepage especially relevant for this seem http://www.niemueller.de/software/patches/networkmanager.php and http://www.niemueller.de/wiki/index.php?GPRSviaBluetooth. You can find more information about earlier projects on my homepage at http://www.niemueller.de.

I proposed this earlier to Jeremy Katz (Fedora Project Board) and Dan Williams (Core Developer of NM) and they were both keen to see this in NM.