Comment 20 for bug 82335

Daniel -- yes, this will help people that have only static IPs. Since nm does not deal with it at all, we are all better off not to run it in this case.

But it does not help much when we have:

1. both static and auto (for example, a static wired, and an auto wireless)

For scenario (1) I can think of a network that requires one to use a specific IP; if this is good use or bad use -- it does not matter: It can be done, and it IS done.

2. both hotplug and auto (for example, a hotpluggable wired, and an auto wireless).

For scenario (2) I can give you my personal current experience with nm: for nm to correctly manage both my laptop wired and wireless interfaces (I have given up hope on PPP, BTW), I have to set both to auto.

Now, nm will recognise all of them fine. And it will try to bring BOTH up, and will set DHCP on BOTH of them. End result: one of them will come up, and the other will cause the logs to flood with DHCP failure messages, completely useless. This bothers me no end...

3. PPP in any form, model, or type.

For scenario (3)... well, nothing can be done with nm (except add a PPP stanza to the /etc/network/interfaces, so that we can still start it off nm).

nm is a good idea, but not yet all done. To have all programs depend on finding if a network is connected from nm is, right now, slightly absurd: (with the risk of boring repetition) how can we BASE network-awareness on something that CANNOT see all of the network interfaces?

The raw truth is we are depending on network-awareness on something that does not see all of the network. I simply cannot see the wisdom on this.

While I was still using SuSE, this had bothered me so much that I completely took out nm (as Daniel suggests). But this is obviously not a solution, methinks.