Re: Interfacing with NetworkManagerUserSettings

[Greg Suarez <gpsuarez2512 gmail com>]

On Feb 24, 2010, at 4:23 PM, Dan Williams wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-02-24 at 16:10 -0800, Greg Suarez wrote:
>> On Feb 24, 2010, at 3:57 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
>> 
>>> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 16:34 -0800, Greg Suarez wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> I'm writing a program to manage wifi profiles and wish to communicate
>>>> the Connection objects to the NetworkManager.
>>>> I can't seem to find documentation on the communication between the
>>>> NetworkManager the the program providing the user settings.
>>>> Can someone point me to where I can get this information or describe
>>>> what I need to do?
>>> 
>>> http://projects.gnome.org/NetworkManager/developers/spec-08.html
>>> 
>>> you're looking for anything that starts with:
>>> 
>>> org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerSettings
>>> 
>>> Both the system settings and user settings services implement this D-Bus
>>> interface.  Essentially, your program needs to respond to the
>>> ListConnections method with an array of the object paths of it's
>>> Connection objects.  Then it also implements the GetSettings method for
>>> each of those connection objects so NM can get the actual connection
>>> details.  You'll also want to implement the .Secrets interface there so
>>> that NM can get network passwords.  Let me know if more you need more
>>> explanation.
>>> 
>>> Dan
>>> 
>>> 
>> Thanks Dan,
>> 
>> Would my program need to request the dbus name org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings or can I use another name?
>> If I need to use org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings wouldn't that interfere with nm-applet?
> 
> Yes, your program needs to request the
> org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerUserSettings bus name if you wish to be a
> user settings service.  And yes, if nm-applet already has that name, you
> can't get it.
> 
> You'd said "I'm writing a program to manage wifi profiles and wish to
> communicate the Connection objects to the NetworkManager.", which I took
> to mean that you wanted to write your own settings service to provide
> network connection data to NM.
> 
> If you want to co-exist with nm-applet, that's not very easy right now
> because for security reasons, only one user settings service is allowed
> to provide network connection data to NetworkManager.  If any process
> could do it, there'd be nothing to stop trojan horse programs from doing
> it too, or from reading your passwords, etc.
> 
> We hope to fix this in the future by providing the full D-Bus interface
> in the user settings service, which would allow other programs to
> manipulate the connection data.  That needs more work in the UI though
> to alert users to the program that is requesting their passwords or
> modifying network settings, and allow the user to either approve the
> other program, deny it, etc.
> 

If I write a program similar to the nm-connection-editor and add a new connection in gconf would nm-applet see the new connection
and prompt for security credentials?

Thanks,

Greg