Comment 8 for bug 133374

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 03:20:33PM -0000, Luka Renko wrote:
> Christian, I cannot agree with your assessment, particularly as
> GNOME/KDE tools by default write interface with auto + dhcp in the
> interfaces file and as this was the setting on previous Ubuntu releases
> that were supposed to work with n-m. So it is clear regression and will
> cause problems with existing customer base that will upgrade to Gutsy.
>
> On the other hand, it is good to know what is workaround and what could
> be the route cause of the problem.
>

The route cause is that assuming auto configured interfaces to be
network-manager managed was wrong in the first place.

In a perfect world users could decide to have a network interface
either nm managed or system tools managed. Combining both just gives
you headaches.

(and yes, I admit that in this particular case it might be really a
bug in nm).

For instance consider the case of two auto dhcp entries in interfaces?
What do you expect as a user? you expect that both interfaces are
started upped, but then network-manager can only manage one upped
interface at the same time. So you have a problem :). Either down all
interfaces on nm startup ... or implement some heuristic that will
down all but one interface upon startup.

The other option would be to just not manager configured interfaces at
all ... and fix the kde/gnome tools to allow you to get to that state
without hacking config files.

 - Alexander