Category: General

There’s no better way to celebrate the release of NetworkManager 0.9.2 than a sip of ice-cold cocktail.  It’s something pink-colored — I don’t know what — and it’s phenomenal.  And if I ever run out, I just ring a bell and somebody fills it up!  It’s basically like Paradise, except Paradise doesn’t have the latest version of NetworkManager.  Here’s a hot tip: make your first half billion and buy yourself a private island.  Then move there and write open-source software for fun.  It’s a pretty great life.  After a hard day on the beach bending networks to my will, I wind down by building buried hatches solely to confuse the island’s next owner (I’m trading up to a private archipelago in a few years).

But I digress.  So many people contributed to this release.  Unfortunately they couldn’t all fly out to my private island for the release party so I’ll just have to call them out by name instead.  I’m sure they’ll take Internet fame as a consolation prize, right?  So a huge thanks to Alfredo Matos, Colin Walters, Dan Winship, David Rothlisberger, Evan Broder, Florian Echtler, Gary Ching-Pang Lin, Jirí Klimeš, Larry Reaves, Ludwig Nussel, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, Michael Stapelberg, Thomas Bechtold, Thomas Graf, Thomas Jarosch, Tore Anderson, Michael Biebl, Vincent Untz, Anders Feder, Giovanni Campagna, Murilo Opsfelder, David Woodhouse, all our translators, and all our testers.  It wouldn’t have happened without you.

This release packs in some great stuff aside from the usual bug fixes and pixie dust: translated country names in the mobile broadband provider wizard, VPN details in the applet’s Connection Information dialog, auto-unlocking of GSM modems, support for libnl2 and libnl3, better IPv6 handling, enhancements for nmcli, rfkill fixes for EeePCs, GObject Introspection updates, better cooperation with unmanaged devices, timestamps for VPN connections, increased dnsmasq cache size, and more.  Get your tarballs on:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/network-manager-applet/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager-openconnect/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager-openswan/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager-openvpn/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager-pptp/0.9/
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/NetworkManager-vpnc/0.9/

0.9.4: a Smörgåsbord of Freaking Awesome

What’s even more exciting is what’s all piled up for 0.9.4.  We’ve killed WEXT and now use the more robust nl80211 for talking to well-behaved kernel drivers.  We’ve uncoupled IPv4 and IPv6 addressing so that when one completes the connection is usable while we wait for the other one to complete or time out.  We’ve added bonding support, and VLANs and bridges are next.  We’ll have better firewall interaction.  We’ll probably have connectivity detection as well.  Many of these features are finished and merged to git master already.

Hey, 0.8.6 is out too!

If you’re into anachronisms, then we’ve got another release for you too.  0.8.6 got tagged earlier this week, and it’s got IPv6 fixes, auto-unlocking of GSM modems, improved usability of IP address and routing entry in the editor, notifications of mobile broadband changes, VPN information in the Connection Information dialog, better handling of gadget devices, retry of Ethernet connections on carrier bounces, allowing certificate paths in keyfile plugins, MAC address blacklists, on-the-fly recognition of newly installed VPN plugins, subject verification of 802.1x certificates, builds without PolicyKit, and much more.

So really it’s just raining NetworkManager goodness.  Except here on my island, where it’s always sunny, breezy, and absolutely perfect.  Time for another drink.  Cheers.

Hurray!  It’s finally out: NetworkManager 0.9.  Thanks to a ton of help from almost 150 contributors and countless testers we’ve reached a new level of awesome.  Let’s drop some recap on y’all:

Fast User Switching

This release debuts full support for fast user switching, a long-requested feature that makes the networking experience on multi-user computers butter-smooth.  As a result of the simplified 0.9 architecture, each user gets their own network applet and each applet can control networking independently, provided that user has permissions to do so.  If you switch and the new active user doesn’t have permissions for a connection, it’s terminated.  It’s as simple as that and works just like you’d expect.

 

Optimized WiFi Roaming

When connected to a large unified WiFi network, like a workplace, university, or hotel, NetworkManager 0.9 enhances roaming behavior as you move between locations.  By using the background scanning and nl80211 features in wpa_supplicant 0.7 and later, you’ll notice fewer drops in connectivity and better signal quality in large networks.  Most kernel drivers will now provide automatic updates of new access points and enhanced connection quality reporting, allowing wpa_supplicant to quickly roam to the best access point when the current access point’s quality degrades and not before.  Yay!  Fewer dropped frames when you’re watching the YouTube Top 100.

 

WiMAX

Are you one of the 70 million and growing WiMAX users?  Got an Intel WiMAX card in your laptop?  Great!  NetworkManager 0.9 lets you jump on blazing fast WiMAX speeds while you’re on the go.  Put that hardware to work: simply pick your provider from the menu, and you’ll be connected automatically when WiMAX is on.

 

Flexible Permissions

Wait, you haven’t taught little Tommy the value of hard-earned cash? Well until you do, you can restrict your metered 3G to everyone but Tommy so he doesn’t run up the bill playing stupid Flash games or poke around with your work email over the VPN.  Or if you’re a sysadmin, you can roll out the same network configuration to multiple users and be sure that unauthorized users can’t connect to networks they shouldn’t be able to.  The combination of connection permissions and flexible PolicyKit-based authorization lets you manage your computer the way you want.

 

Consolidated Configuration

No longer do we have multiple settings services storing information in different formats and locations.  Instead, all network connection information is stored by NetworkManager itself leading to faster network connections and simpler configuration.  Applications now have one place to look for network configuration instead of two; one place to update instead of two; one place to monitor for changes instead of two; you get the picture.  More features in half the code, yo.

 

Flexible Secrets

Passwords for any connection can now be stored securely in each user’s session or in privileged system connection storage.  If you’re a bit paranoid you can choose to enter any password every time you connect instead of saving it.  For system administrators this means you can have one connection for all users even if each user’s password is different or they use On-Time-Pad tokens.  By default sensitive secrets (like VPN and 802.1x passwords) are stored in the user’s session while generic ones (like WiFi passphrases, etc) are stored system-wide to balance privacy and usability.  If you’ve got a different idea of balance, it’s trivial to open it up or lock it down just as much as you like.  If you’re on a mobile device and you just don’t care, you can leave everything to NetworkManager and ignore user sessions completely.

 

Simplified D-Bus API

Consolidation of the API makes it radically simpler for applications to respond to network changes, be smarter about what networks you’re connected to, and how you’re connected to them.  It’s trivial to figure out if you’re at home or at work and to do the right thing, so now there’s really no excuse to make your application do what your users expect.  And it’s easier to write cool new network applets and configuration UI too.  Go wild.  Make your apps sing.

 

GObject Introspection

Want to use NetworkManager from applications that aren’t written in C or C++?  With the GObject Introspection it’s trivial to use the NetworkManager convenience libraries from Python or JavaScript or any other introspection-enabled language.  Start writing lickable new applets or make your app network aware in the easiest way possible.

const NMClient = imports.gi.NMClient;
client = NMClient.Client.new();
if (client.state == NetworkManager.State.CONNECTED_GLOBAL)
    print "You're connected!"

 

Developers and Distros

Because it’s a change in D-Bus and libnm-glib API, we’ve prepared a migration guide for developers.  If your app just cares about whether you’re connected to the network and how, here are some example patches.  Distro packagers should check for the latest versions of chat, backup, browser, mail, etc programs since they probably have had NM 0.9 support for months.  As always, there’s a bunch of developer information and API documentation on the website and wiki.  If you don’t find what you’re looking for, tell us how to improve!

 

120 Proof for the Future

But this much awesome just isn’t enough.  Always looking forward, NetworkManager is primed for great new features like connectivity detection, captive portal auto-login, network zones, automatic firewall and proxy management, new hardware support, and more.  As a result of the API cleanup done for 0.9, NM is ready for the next wave of great features that will actually make your life better.  A faster, more robust release process will ensure these features get to you more quickly.  If we’ve done our job, you won’t even notice that NetworkManager is there; but it will be, saving the planet one network at a time.

Lock up your booze and your network cards (in that order), I’m hitting up Berlin for Desktop Summit.  I’ll be talking about network and location awareness in your application on Sunday, which is thinly veiled code for how to make NetworkManager and ModemManager tell you where you are and how to get where you want to go.  I’ll also be hosting a BOF (with Will Stephenson, hopefully) on Wednesday afternoon in which you can alternatively deride and praise networking on Linux.  If you don’t attend, I will be supremely disappointed and you can be assured WiFi access points will shun your feeble attempts at association.  Otherwise let the summitting begin.

The big reason that NetworkManager 0.9 is slower to connect than NM 0.8 is that we flipped IPv6 addressing on by default.  That means that when you connect to a new network and that network supports IPv6 autoconfiguration via router advertisements you’ll get IPv6 connectivity.  But if that network doesn’t support IPv6 then you’ll spin for 60 seconds or so waiting for a router advertisement because there’s nothing on the network that listens to the IPv6 autoconf solicitations that the kernel puts out when the link comes up.  You can fix that but changing the IPv6 addressing method to “Ignore” in nm-connection-editor if you know your network doesn’t support IPv6.

Why don’t we bring up IPv4 and just wait for IPv6 to happen in the background?  That’s a great question; I’m glad I asked it.  First, it requires some small changes in NetworkManager’s D-Bus interface to add connected states for both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously so that applications can listen for when each stack’s connectivity is available.  That’s trivial.  It could be done tomorrow.  It’s not a technical problem at all.

But second, it requires applications to be smarter about what resources they require and to do smart things when those resources aren’t available.  And that apparently happens when solid gold pigs start dropping out of the sky.  I hope you have falling-gold-pig insurance for your car.  But app authors often don’t make their applications smarter and more network aware because hey, that’s more work for them, and hey, people haven’t requested this yet, and hey, that’s one more D-Bus API I need to depend on and I don’t know what else.

NetworkManager says it’s connected via a global “State” property.  That property is a logical OR of both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity.  If one is connected then the State property is NM_STATE_CONNECTED.  Great, right?  But if NM flips the state to CONNECTED when IPv4 completes but IPv6 is still waiting, then your favorite IRC application will try to connect to your IPv6-enabled IRC server.   Except IPv6 isn’t up yet so it fails.  And you get mad because shit doesn’t magically work.

And then what happens if IPv6 fails?  Do we fail the entire connection?  Or do we just keep listening for IPv6 router advertisements and when one comes in configure the interface?  Currently there’s a setting called ‘failure fatal’ for both IPv4 and IPv6 that lets you determine that behavior; it defaults to TRUE for IPv4 and FALSE for IPv6 since so many networks don’t yet have IPv6 enabled.  But this really is something we shouldn’t have to care much about.

And that brings us back to applications.  When NetworkManager adds dual-stack connected state, which is actually pretty trivial to do, the applications have to listen to that and care so that your life is better.  If the app has an IPv6 address and NM indicates that IPv6 isn’t yet available, the app needs to wait until NM says it is available.  Same for IPv4.  The problem is that nobody ever seems to bother with this sort of intelligence at the application level, but that’s where it’s really needed, since the connection manager has no idea what servers you’re connecting to and whether or not they are IPv4 or IPv6.

As a side rant about application intelligence, apps should also allow you to associate resources (like internal VPN-only mail servers) with NetworkManager VPN connection UUIDs so that they only check the mail on your corporate VPN when NM says your VPN connection is up.  You can do that now.  It’s been there for years.  But nobody bothers to write that sort of useful support into applications either.  Where does the application’s responsibility for intelligence begin?  Useful insights on where that line gets drawn are most welcome.  So are comments about how hot Colin Walter’s mom is.

Pidgin

As a reply to Andrew’s comments about NM 0.9 and Pidgin, I wrote patches a while back of which one got commited and a second is pending.

tinc and VPN plugins

Andrew also talked about tinc and how he’d love if it had NetworkManager integration.

NetworkManager expects quite a bit out of VPN services; they cannot simply be dumb services that expect everything to be statically configured for every user on the system.  Why?  Because NetworkManager allows many different configurations of VPN setttings; you might have one VPN for your cover-story workplace and one for your Secret Three Letter Agency that you only use in secure locations.  That configuration is stored in NM config files in /etc and includes not just VPN-specific configuration, but also IPv4 and IPv6 configuration, static routes, DNS and search domain information, and a human-readable name and connection UUID.  This allows the user to override configuration the VPN might automatically return.  In the future we’ll add proxy configuration and firewall rules to that list.  Because all these things are highly specific to a single network connection (be that VPN, wifi, wired, 3G, whatever), they need to be kept together, changed together, and applied together.  No existing VPN configuration file format supports all this.  But NetworkManager does.

This means that we cannot simply use /etc/openvpn.conf or /etc/tinc/tinc.conf because

1. standard config files often contain only one network: they are essentially “public” configuration files and the concept falls apart if you have ever configured more than one VPN; while some VPN daemons do have formats that allow defining more than one network, many do not.
2. config files cannot encode related connection information: there is often no facility for expanded network-specific configuration like proxies, firewall rules, additional IP addresses, static routes, DNS search domains, etc that should be associated with VPN connection.
3. secrets should be stored securely: if the user wants secure password storage in the GNOME Keyring or KWallet or whatever, they should be able to do so.  The user should be able to keep the password in their session or even provide it on-demand and not require it to be stored in system configuration files.
4. secrets can change periodically: at Red Hat we use RSA SecurID tokens that generate a new PIN code every 30 seconds which is entered every time we connect.  Many VPN daemons will ask for passwords too, but that requires a terminal.  Fail.  We want to ask for secrets in a generic manner which is appropriate to each desktop environment (or lack thereof), and existing VPN secret request mechanisms (stdin, TCP management socket, static config files, etc) simply do not allow this.

To work around these limitations of configuration files, NetworkManager dynamically generates configuration for each VPN daemon and inserts your password when required, retrieved from secure GNOME Keyring/KWallet storage or from a PIN entry dialog or other mechanism.  The VPN daemon is then executed and handed that configuration, either a path to a private, root-owned, transient configuration file or, even better cleanly written to stdin if the VPN daemon supports it.

Which leads me to tinc.  Nothing appears to preclude creation of  NetworkManager VPN plugin for tinc, but there are some complications that it would be great to get fixed upstream:

• quite a few configuration files required for each VPN network, and a plugin would have to create all these files dynamically before executing tincd; it appears that tinc 1.0.14 allows arbitrary config options on the command-line, which helps somewhat, but even better would be accepting configuration on stdin as a single unit instead of a bunch of separate files.  This way no config files (possibly including secrets) might mistakenly get left lying around due to segfaults or programming errors.
• configuration appears to require an explicit device name (like “tun0”) which is a huge no-no; if the program can’t dynamically determine a suitable device name and return that to the caller, it gets a F- grade from me.  If the user configures more than one VPN that they might use concurrently, they shouldn’t have to manually plan out interface names.  At least it appears that tinc sends the interface name to the “up” script in the INTERFACE environment variable.
• like OpenVPN, it appears that many attributes of the VPN connection cannot be auto-detected, which requires the user to know a-priori what the VPN configuration will be.  Stuff like “Cipher”, “Compression”, “Digest”, etc.  This never helps users and apparently everybody writing VPN software thinks the user of their software is already a system administrator.  I hope I’m wrong about this.  If I’m not, hopefully tinc emits status information indicating that the parameters set in configuration are incompatible with the peers it’s trying to connect to such that we can notify the user about it.
• it’s unclear to me how tinc reports status and progress in a usable manner; it appears that one can send signals to tincd, but they dump information to syslog.  Ideally tincd would include an option to dump this information to stdout as well, because screen-scraping syslog is just completely evil.

None of these issues are killers; but they simply result in a degraded experience for the user of tincd if that user is not a system administrator.  At this point vpnc is the best-behaved VPN daemon because it (a) accepts configuration on stdin, (b) can request secrets dynamically via stdin, (c) automatically negotiates most options with the peer, and (d) doesn’t have 50,000 configuration options with complex interdependencies.  I hope tinc can get there too.

If anyone wants to write a NetworkManager VPN plugin for tinc, definitely let  me know or jump onto the mailing list and we’d be glad to help out with suggestions and advice.

Next in the long line of illustrious NetworkManager releases, out comes 0.8.4.  It loves to party, and if you look close enough it’s busting a move just to the left of the dude with a star on his hat at its own release party.  Hell yeah.  It’s a great release and packs a lot of fixes and features, including but not limited to fixes for IPv6, DHCP, DNS, no  longer touching /etc/hosts, WWAN, and VPN.  Hot tarballs are here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/NetworkManager/0.8/NetworkManager-0.8.4.0.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/network-manager-applet/0.8/network-manager-applet-0.8.4.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/NetworkManager-openconnect/0.8/NetworkManager-openconnect-0.8.4.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/NetworkManager-openvpn/0.8/NetworkManager-openvpn-0.8.4.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/NetworkManager-pptp/0.8/NetworkManager-pptp-0.8.4.tar.bz2
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/NetworkManager-vpnc/0.8/NetworkManager-vpnc-0.8.4.tar.bz2

A huge thanks to everyone who helped out with this release: Jirí Klimeš, Michael Biebl, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, Ozan Ça?layan, Robby Workman, Mu Qiao, Pierre Ossman, Mikhail Efremov, Andrey Borzenkov, Karsten Hopp, Ionut Biru, Robert Piasek, Torsten Spindler, Richard Hughes, Radek Vykydal, Canek Peláez Valdés, Wulf C. Krueger, and anyone I’ve forgotten.

Now back to the 0.9 train.  Shake it hard and keep it rockin’ people.

And doesn’t it feel good, too.  Yeah!  There’s a crapton of great fixes in NetworkManager 0.8.4, and just for you, beta1 is here.  Changes for NM itself include:

• Logging fixes to suppress unnecessary messages
• Fix potential 64-bit crash updating timestamps
• IPv6 setup, routing, and compliance fixes
• Handle reverse DNS lookups with local caching nameserver configurations
• No longer updates /etc/hosts when hostname changes
• Request WPAD option from DHCP servers
• Shutdown crash fixes
• nmcli support for WWAN connections
• Persistent hostname sent to DHCP servers by default
• Allow disabing PPP support at build time
• Memory leak fixes

while on the applet and editor side:

• Updated translations
• Conversion to GtkBuilder
• Fixes for newer libnotify versions
• Allow MD5 as a wired 802.1x EAP method
• Show IPv6 information in Connection Information dialog
• Completely fix crashes due to missing icons
• Make VPN notifications respect user’s “Enable Notifications” preference

There’s literally a mountain of tarballs for your networking pleasure.  And there’s fresh updates for both Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 to satisfy yo mama.

And what about 0.9?  Huh?

That’s the question both you and Justin Bieber want to know.  We’ve had the 0.9 train kicked into high gear since long before Lady Gaga even thought about eggs, and it’s getting damn near the station.  Giovanni Campagna nailed the GObject Introspection support and is making the GNOME Shell indicator his bitch, while Richard Hughes is all over the new control center applet.  On the Ubuntu side, Matt Trudel posted a Unity indicator patch for the applet which will hit soon.  It’s shaping up to be an epic release. When?

March 16.

Let’s do this.