GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 764406
[RFE] allow activating one NMSettingsConnection on multiple devices at the same time
Last modified: 2020-11-12 14:34:06 UTC
Especially since the applied-connection changes, an NMActiveConnection has a clone of the original NMSettingsConnection from the time of activation. Currently, you can only activate on NMSettingsConnection on one device at a time. This restriction complicates code in NetworkManager. For example, activating a device that is already active on another device requires to first deactivate the other device. It also is an unnecessary restriction for the user. In most cases a default DHCP connection would be sufficient. But if a user has multiple devices he is forced to create multiple connections as well -- instead of one generic connection named "dhcp". During auto-activation, we search for the best connection to activate. As currently a connection can only be activated on one device, the search skips connections that are already active. When allowing to activate on multiple devices, the algorithm can either still skip already active connections or re-use the same matching connection. The latter makes probably more sense, but can be implemented either way.
Another use could be for the default-wired-connection. Together with bug 772414, we could provide a package NetworkManager-connection-default-wired which installs a default-wired-connection in keyfile format to "/usr/lib/NetworkManager/connection.d". That seems better to me then our current approach of generating wired connections for each device.
So this would essentially clone the already-active connection to a new connection, and add that to settings as a completely new connection? Or would it use the same base connection? If it did this, how would we handle connection changes to the device's runtime config that then get saved? IIRC NM used to allow the same connection on multiple devices, but we switched because people got really confused why the same connection was active on multiple devices. There's was (and still is?) a pretty hard association in people's minds that connection == device, though we've tried hard to change that over the past 10 years. Not saying we shouldn't change it back, but we should figure out the side-effects/implications and the user-interface/behavior impacts first...
(In reply to Dan Williams from comment #2) > So this would essentially clone the already-active connection to a new > connection, and add that to settings as a completely new connection? hm... when we activate a (settings) connection, we already clone it as applied-connection. But it wouldn't clone the settings-connection... > Or would it use the same base connection? If it did this, how would we > handle connection changes to the device's runtime config that then get saved? Not sure what you mean here. Currently the settings-connection is pretty decoupled from runtime changes on the actual device. That is, changes to the settings-connection don't propagate to the device (except connection.zone and connection.metered *sigh*) or vice versa. > IIRC NM used to allow the same connection on multiple devices, but we > switched because people got really confused why the same connection was > active on multiple devices. There's was (and still is?) a pretty hard > association in people's minds that connection == device, though we've tried > hard to change that over the past 10 years. > > Not saying we shouldn't change it back, but we should figure out the > side-effects/implications and the user-interface/behavior impacts first... Exactly, basically I ask to revert https://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/commit/?id=a1f16cd4d9fff66d7feeee0846e554c9c3a5f998 , https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=997998
See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1555012
bugzilla.gnome.org is being shut down in favor of a GitLab instance. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use NetworkManager and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a recent and supported version of NetworkManager, then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/-/issues/ Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (workforce and time is unfortunately limited).