[approach-discuss] first draft of Network Auto-Magic architecture

[Nicolas Williams]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 11:20:51AM -0800, John Beck wrote:
> 	It is not yet clear whether:
> 	* the active profile is always persistent across reboots
> 	or
> 	* there may be support for a temporarily active profile which
> 	  does not persist across reboots
> 
> to which you replied:
> 
> Nico> Mobile systems definitely need the latter as you cannot rely on any
> Nico> network being available at boot time.

> [...]
> 
> For example, there will likely be an out-of-the box profile for "no network"
> which specifies files for everything in /etc/nsswitch.conf, disables
> services which make no sense in a stand-alone environment, etc.  Then at
> boot, the profile daemon would consult the meta-preferences, note that there
> was no networking, then automatically select that profile.

Your answer to this seems to be: NWAM can be configured to figure out
what to profile to pick at the next boot.

Which gets us to:

> As another example, a user like you or I might specify meta-preferences of
> the form "when a wired network with IP addresses in the range 129.144.0.0/12
> is detected, I must be on the SWAN, so activate the SWAN profile", then
> separately create a SWAN profile which specifies "use name server X, use
> files/dns/nis or files/nis in /etc/nsswitch.conf, use this NIS server,
> enable the SMF service nis/client, etc."

As long as in the process I don't enable, say, the rlogin service this
is reasonably OK, but generally this scares me a bit because there's no
easy way to authenticate the network as being SWAN (or whatever).  That
there there never can be, mind you, but that typically there isn't.

Once Solaris rocks enough that folks outside Sun want to put it on their
laptops (i.e., when suspend/resume for x86/64 is available) I can see
some customers being this paranoid.  I.e., I predict some customers will
demand an option for interactive profile selection at all times.

> Thus I think your comment above will become irrelevant, as meta-preferences
> will be able to select the appropriate profile, and that situation can be
> handled.  Given the current text, however, your suggestion was perfectly
> reasonable.  :-)  We will make all this clearer in draft 0.2, coming soon.

Well, maybe; given an option to make all profile selections interactive
(which I think NWAM should have) then you'll want an option to specify
a boot-time network profile other than "the last one that was active."

BTW, does GNOME/JDS have support for ballon pop-ups in the applet tray?
Or anything of the sort?

Nico
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