Hey, On 5/17/07, Ulrik Mikaelsson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > Please jump in with your thoughts and ideas. I'm planning to attempt > hacking some of this together, but I'd like to get some feedback > first, to ensure I'm right on track. Also, if you're hacking on > something related, please let me know so we don't waste a lot of good > effort.
I am working on exactly that. It's been a very long journey since NM was written for wired and wireless devices and adding a new device type (modem) cleanly wasn't really possible (in NM 0.6 branch). After a lot of rework that's gone in to svn trunk, the devices are more abstract, the device activation takes an abstract NMConnection structure for activation info (like IP configuration, wireless security, modem options, ppp options), etc. That's not where the pain ends, it turns out there are no modem dialers that are usable for NM. There actually seem to be only two (at least popular ones), wvdial and chat. wvdial is C++, has a bunch of C++ dependencies and has no way to just dial without starting pppd (which NM will need for general PPP support). chat isn't really a dialer either. Pretty much all the other "dialers" seem to be just frontends for these two. If anyone knows a dialer that would fit for NM, please let me know, I'd love to throw away what I've come up with so far. That is yet not all, it also turns out HAL doesn't have any notion of modems so the best we can do for now is to get a list of HAL devices with capability "serial" and try to send some modem initialization strings and see if they respond. That is for the serial devices that actually show up in HAL at all. Most of the thinkpads have a modem that only works with proprietary HSF modem driver and these do not show up in HAL at all. So it all has been surprisingly hard. For this last week I've been working on the actual modem device and ppp interface for NM. The current status is that NM is able to dial out and establish a serial connection that is suitable for ppp. There's a wrapper that turns NM activation structure NMConnection to PPP command line, starts pppd with a special pppd plugin that'll report ppp events (like "got IP information", warnings, errors, etc). I'm planning to get all this to svn next week. If you're interested in helping out, I would love to answer any questions you have about it! Tambet _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
