On 12/09/2009 07:50 PM, David Lutterkort wrote:
On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 00:28 +0100, elias wrote:
>> netcf is expected to read existing interfaces. For example, Fedora's
>> installer will set up interface config files in
>> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, and netcf knows how to parse these and
>> exposes the interface list through its API (and ncftool). If the user
>> creates a config for a bridge interface and drops it in /etc/..., netcf
>> will see that as well.
>>
> I was referring to reading existing interfaces directly from the system, as an
> interface might even be changed/created by another 3rd party tool like
> OpenVPN.
> OpenVPN might be one of the more harmless scenarios here as it usually just
> adds/removes an TUN/TAP interface, but there are a plenty of 3rd party tools
> out there in the wild which do way more changes.
> I think it would be really important to be able to rely not only on the static
> interface configuration, as this would limit the usage scope of netcf IMHO
> quite too much.
>
Initially, netcf was strictly meant as a tool to munge interface
configuration via ncf_define and ncf_if_xml_desc. Laine added support
for querying 'live' config (i.e., properties of interfaces as they are
running, rather than what's in configuration files) with
ncf_if_xml_state. That works reasonably well, though there's probably
some room for improvement for more esoteric setups.
Note that ncf_if_xml_state will only return current state info about
interfaces that are described in the config, so it's not exactly what
you're looking for. At least one other person has suggested it would be
useful for netcf to return info on transient interfaces, though.