On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:54:39 -0500, Dan Williams wrote: > In the case of VPN, why do other programs _care_? What good does it do > to advertise VPN connections to other applications at all? Most > applications care about "getting to the internet", which a VPN does for > you. In the case of a VPN, routing-table+DNS magic will provide the > ability to use VPN connections for certain blocks of addresses (both IP > and DNS) which is completely transparent to the application anyway, even > without NetworkManager. The kernel is doing the packet routing here, > not user applications.
I think some applications might care, e.g. email client. My usage pattern looks like this: 1) Connect to the Internet 2) If I am in the company LAN, go to step 4 3) connect to the VPN 4) Sync my email Now NM removes the requirement on doing the step 1 manually. While I would like to keep the opportunity to run step 3 manually, I would still like to avoid having to perform step 4 manually, if there is a way for an application to receive this notice. Imagine evolution plug which would automatically switch an email account to online / offline, based on the specific VPN availability. I think that the NM would be the right place to do this, since it should operate network interfaces, VPN included. Tomislav _______________________________________________ NetworkManager-list mailing list NetworkManager-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list