[Pkg-ltsp-devel] Bug#810934: Please hide initramfs eth card from NetworkManager more robustly

[Alkis Georgopoulos]

 > it would be great if ltsp could more directly express what it really
 > wants to do by creating a /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ltsp.conf snippet

Some thoughts on this:

1) LTSP chroots don't have network-manager installed by default, they 
are minimal images generated by debootstrap.
It's possible to build LTSP "fat" chroots that do have nm installed 
though (along with a whole desktop environment).

2) Even if nm was installed, ifupdown would still ifdown the interfaces 
on shutdown (with the old ifupdown behaviour), right? So creating 
/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/ltsp.conf wouldn't help there, would it?

3) Conceptually, ifupdown's "manual" isn't exactly the same as 
network-manager's "unmanaged". For example, nm could allow the users to 
see the connection speed or status or add VPNs over it, without allowing 
them to activate/deactivate the interface.

4) It's also possible to netboot clients using AoE (ATA over Ethernet), 
where the root file system is accessible with ethernet packets even if 
the interface doesn't have an IP, the only prerequisite is for it to 
always be up. So if nm could respect that, then it could manage the 
interface normally, it could use dhclient to assign an IP to it etc.

I just wanted to mention these thoughts, I'll leave it up to the LTSP 
Debian maintainer to decide if he wants to tag the connection as 
unmanaged or not.
Cheers!