Re: Some various thoughts on PPP
On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 14:27 +0300, Tambet Ingo wrote: On 5/18/07, Ulrik Mikaelsson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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? NM uses a new device NMDeviceModem to dial out (in process) and starts pppd process. The dbus interface will remain the same as for all the other devices, just the activation structure will contain modem and ppp specific data. If we want (and probably do), we can add a new dbus interface for dialup devices (just like wired and wireless devices have their own device specific interface in addition to the standard device interface) that has additional status signals for better progress reporting (like, initializing modem, dialing, ...). pppd process will emit dbus signals (with help from a pppd plugin) so NM knows what's going on. 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. :) Yeah, this is unfortunate. Pretty much identical to the wireless situation until wpa_supplicant provided us with a standard interface. I guess for each of these multi-device card we'll have to write a NMDeviceModem subclass, ugh. Most broadband cards I've seen have the first serial interface be the actual data interface. But that's not really helpful. We may have to create HAL fdi files to tell HAL about the different broadband cards and phones and such. But I think this can live in HAL, and we can just have the .fdi files assign a property to the device to tag it as one we can/should use, including the serial interface we care about. Dan ___ NetworkManager-list mailing list NetworkManager-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
Re: Some various thoughts on PPP
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 NetworkManager-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
Re: Some various thoughts on PPP
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 NetworkManager-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
