Renee Danson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 02:48:47PM -0400, Sebastien Roy wrote:
>> My personal opinion is that the object "data-link" or "IP interface" 
>> exists and is manageable regardless of whether a human or a computer is 
>> doing the managing.  Having different FMRIs to represent who's managing 
>> them seems strange, as their properties are the same regardless.
> 
> Also agreed.  So the question is how does the management happen when
> the nwam daemon is not doing it?
>
> I'm wondering if we might be able to solve this problem by taking a
> somewhat larger step in nwam phase 1 than we'd planned.  Currently,
> the network/physical:default start method is a script that examines
> the /etc/hostname.* and /etc/dhcp.* files and brings up the interfaces
> represented by those files.  Alternatively, that service can be disabled
> and network/physical:nwam can be enabled instead; in which case nwamd
> is started, which brings up/down interfaces dynamically depending on
> network conditions.
> 
> The ultimate goal was to have nwam enabled all the time, and to eliminate
> network/physical:default.  But given the desire to get some functionality
> in sooner, phase 1 was split off to support more common configurations;
> phase 2 will come later with more complete support.  Since phase 1 will
> not support all network configurations (no vlans, aggregations, ipmp
> groups), though, we didn't think we could eliminate network/physical:default
> at this point; there still needs to be an option for those systems that
> required more complex configurations.
> 
> So if we're moving all the configuration data into the instances, to be 
> accessed by nwamd as well as the manual tools such as dladm, can we also
> move the start-up bits as well?  Would it be possible to go ahead and
> eliminate network/physical:default now, and have start methods associated
> with the link and interface instances (based on the relevant bits of the
> existing network/physical:default start method) that can be used for the
> non-nwam case?  That way, the administrator decides which of the interfaces
> should be configured by enabling/disabling the appropriate service instances.
> I think this helps non-nwam systems, as changes to the configuration can be
> more easily accomplished with svcadm commands rather than reboots.

Yes!  I think this makes a ton of sense.  For data-link services, the 
configuration is reflected in each service's properties.  This would, 
however, be a bit muddled for IP interface services, as their 
configuration would be split between contents of /etc/hostname.* (and 
/etc/dhcp.*) files when NWAM is not enabled, and service properties when 
NWAM is enabled.  That is, of course, unless you decide to do away with 
/etc/hostname.* files entirely. :-)

> The delegated restarter would still be a problem: we would want the
> restarter to be nwamd if the nwam service were enabled, but that wouldn't
> make sense if the nwam service were disabled.  Does it make sense to try
> to extract the restarter bits from nwamd and have a separate net-mgmt
> daemon?

Would it help if what is dlmgmtd today in Clearview UV and this restarter 
daemon were the same thing?

-Seb

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