Thanks for the wrap-up. Gave me a great orientation of the current status. :)
One of the things that eludes me though; how exactly are you envisioning the NM-dialing-connection process? From what I understand, you're planning to have NM itself dial, and then hand-over the connection to pppd, linked in to NM? Will this be carried out in a separate process, with DBUS-connection to the main process? Is this somehow supporting the desire to keep network-configuration centralized within the distribution, or will it require configuration separate from, say /etc/ppp/peers? > 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. I saw things in the commit-log. Great. :) > 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. Well, perhaps there's another quirk to it, as far as I understand, many modems expose several devices, for different uses. Especially, the GRPS-datacard I tested had three of them, one for the ppp-connection, one for chatting with the card simultaneously with the connection, querying signal strength and such, and one for to me unknown purposes. Somehow we'll gotta figure which is which. :) > 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! Sounds great! I'll definitely check it out. _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
