On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 02:46:50PM -0500, Ken Teh wrote:
> Is it true that the network manager service turns off the network when there is no activity?

Think of it this way.

The network manager was invented to handle Wifi on laptops. (And it works well enough for that).

When used for any other purpose, well, what do you expect, it was not invented for that.

This is the new-think engineering through the "but it works on my laptop!" paradigm.

In practice. I use the network manager on most server-type computers (as it comes
pre-installed, pre-enabled with SL6). As long as you remember to open the network
connection editor and enable the right "available to all users" and "enable on boot"
buttons, it seems to work well enough, as long as nothing goes wrong.

When things go wrong in server-type-specific ways, well the network manager does
not know what to do, even for the simplest cases, like the network link going
down for an hour (maintenance of UPS power to the network switch). I have seen
it drop it's IP address and never ask for another one (should have issued
a DHCP request when network link came back up, then maybe should have tried
again every hour). I have also seen the network manager drop it's IP address
(and never ask for another one) after an eth device hang (eth chip vs driver
compatibility) when a simple "ifconfig down/up" would have recovered the system.

I tend to think that these days one should go back to static IP addresses
for server-type machines, after all, all DHCP, network manager & co do is assign
the same IP address to the same machine over and over and over again with the only
variation when they fail to do the boring thing and you have a machine down, staying
down until somebody physically walks to it to reboot it.

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada