HAL 0.5.x & networking

[Sean Meiners]

Thanks for the fast response!

On Jun 8, 2005, at 7:27 AM, David Zeuthen wrote:

> On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 07:20 -0700, Sean Meiners wrote:
>
>> I've been investigating HAL and decided to look at the latest release
>> (0.5.2) and noticed it no longer seems to monitor network devices as
>> the 0.4.x series did.  Specifically, no events were generated when
>> the network cable was unplugged, or the interface was brought up or
>> down.  I was wondering if this was intentionally removed?
>>
>
> It was intentionally removed - too many bad drivers caused the  
> system to
> lock up and it was just painful to support. The thinking was that it's
> equally easy for applications using HAL to do themselves. You should
> still get a HAL event when the interface is brought up and down but  
> I'm
> not sure how useful that is..

Then you might want to consider removing the interface_up key since  
it's pretty much useless without a monitor behind it.  Unless of  
course client applications can modify keys (something I haven't  
looked into yet).

Speaking of bad drivers, I noticed that non-PCI PCMCIA and USB  
network devices won't currently show up in HAL.  I tracked it down to  
the fact that net_add specifically looks for /sys/class/net/<if>/ 
device and if it fails to find it, gives up.  Unfortunately, drivers  
like airo don't provide device symlinks.  I created a patch to remove  
this restriction and the devices show up, but with no parents (as  
would be expected).  I'd be happy to send it along as well as  
entertain other ideas of how to resolve the issue.

>
>
>> Or if it's
>> just something that hadn't been ported to the new architecture yet?
>> I'm asking mostly to prevent duplication of effort since I was
>> planning on writing an addon for it today since I need it for part of
>> a larger project I'm working on to try and make networking on Linux
>> work as well as it does on Mac (forget Windows).
>>
>
> That's exactly what NetworkManager
>
>  http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/
>
> is about - have you seen it? There's really a lot of gotchas that Dan
> Williams had to deal with along the way but it's coming along rather
> nicely (a few months back VPN support was added) - we're always  
> looking
> for more hackers (I think Dan got a TODO list) :-)

I looked at it a few months back and it looks nice.  The only problem  
I had was that it does *everything* itself.  And since we're Debian  
based I prefer to use the rather nice if(up|down) system that's  
already available to do most of the work since so many other things  
(pppd, resolvconf, etc) have been made to work very well with it.   
However, I've been planning on giving NetworkManager a second look to  
see where it's at now.

-- Sean


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