[Dev] [consensus][due: 2016-08-10] increasing security in Parabola, servers

[Luke Shumaker]

On Tue, 02 Aug 2016 15:26:13 -0400,
pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) wrote:
> [1  <multipart/signed (7bit)>]
> [1.1 Re: [Dev] [consensus][due: 2016-08-10] increasing security in Parabola, servers <multipart/mixed (7bit)>]
> [1.1.1  <text/plain; windows-1252 (quoted-printable)>]
> On 08/02/2016 08:44 PM, Luke Shumaker wrote:
> > On Tue, 02 Aug 2016 04:43:28 -0400,
> > hellekin wrote:
> >> NetworkManager sounds like useless bloatware in that context.
> > 
> > NetworkManager is useless bloatware in any context.
> 
> NetworkManager is easy to use and sufficiently versatile for
> laptops/tablets when one wants to quickly change network settings with a
> GUI (e.g. for wireless, internet sharing, …). For a server I don’t think
> it really matters; all of them work and are easy to set up.

I have a netctl "GUI"[1].  The only time I think NetworkManager could
provide anything of value over it is the GUI for joining an WPA-EAP
network; since netctl's `wifi-menu` doesn't support them.  And then,
when I've reluctantly installed NetworkManager to set up these, I just
port the NetworkManager config over to netctl.

Why doing this is worth it over just using NetworkManager:

 - You won't open your laptop and find the screen filled with
   (litterally) 200 messages informing you that it failed to connect
   to whatever wifi network.
 - It won't segfault if gnome-keyring isn't installed.
 - You'll never get weird error messages about "Error -14" that when
   you track them down, you find the comment "// XXX: TODO: we should
   probably have proper error handling"
 - When your wifi card craps out and you replace it, you won't find
   that all of your saved wifi networks mysteriously don't work
   anymore.
 - When you get a new laptop and copy over the configuration, you
   won't find that all of your saved wifi networks mysteriously don't
   work anymore.

[1]: https://lukeshu.com/git/dotfiles/tree/.config/wmii-hg/rbar_wifi

-- 
Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker