User:Pavlix

Mail: psimerda AT redhat DOT com, pavlix AT pavlix DOT net

Jabber: pavlix AT pavlix DOT net

IRC Freenode: pavlix (#nm and a couple of other channels)

Phone: +420 775 996 256

Timezone: Europe/Prague (CET), sometimes available through later hours

Wiki resources

• Networking – A starting point for information related to networking.
• Tools/NetworkManager – NetworkManager information page.

Contributions are welcome.

Upstream contributions

• NetworkManager
  • Separate operating system interaction module (nm-platform, with Dan Winship)
  • Userspace IPv6 autoconfiguration (nm-rdisc, with Jiří Pírko)
  • Runtime (non-persistent) configuration support (with Dan Winship and Dan Williams)

About me

From my Linux beginnings, I was attracted by the networking world. I kept experimenting, then started freelancing for companies and ISPs providing consultancy, training, network configuration, programming and other services. I started writing articles and talking at conferences about network-related topics. I was keeping more and more bug reports in various projects including Fedora. After a recent conference talk I was hired by Red Hat and finally started fixing those bugs and working on NetworkManager and other networking-related projects.

I have been using Fedora for some time. My primary interest is computer networking and I didn't like many things in linux networking and particularly in NetworkManager. I've been talking about it and watching and filing bug reports for too long. When I recieved an offer to work regularly on NetworkManager, it was natural to accept.

At the time I joined NetworkManager development, I already had a history of articles, talks and trainings on IPv6 so I started fixing IPv6 automatic configuration. In NetworkManager 0.9.6 it connects to any standard IPv6 networks.

I didn't particularly like how NetworkManager works so after learning a bit about it, I started working on some larger-scale changes in a separate branch called 'pavlix/next' that is described below. All of the modifications are made with the goal of making NetworkManager more robust, testable, debuggable and useful for all sorts of use cases including server, virtualization and desktop.

During my work on NetworkManager, I see more and more problems with other network-related tools including kernel, glibc, avahi, nss-mdns but also with the IETF standards. We have many more things to be fixed (or replaced, if anyone likes that better) than just NetworkManager.

Linux networking

I'm currently working on the following (may be outdated):

• New platform interaction framework
• NetworkManager upstream QA, bug triaging (component general) and bits of documentation
• Virtual device support (bridging, bonding, etc)
• Fixes and improvements for getaddrinfo() in glibc
• Configuration formats
• Building NetworkManager on any distribution without unnecessary hassle
• IPv4 and IPv6 automatic configuration improvements (NDP and DHCP)
• Various NetworkManager fixups and cleanups (like anyone else in the team)
• Various linux networking improvements

When working with linux networking, the following projects cause me headache:

• NetworkManager itself: I need to test NM in a virtual environment with bridges. These are not supported in the current release. I hope to make the next release mature enough to support its own development.
• Kernel: The kernel IPv6 networking layer is somewhat unmanagable. The rtnetlink interface doesn't provide enough funcionality to support IPv6 networking.
• GLIBC: The getaddrinfo() function doesn't work properly and is not supported in nsswitch.conf. It breaks whenever my development machine happens to be on an IPv4-only network.
• nss-mdns (Avahi nsswitch plugin): Can't implement link-local name resolution because of the above problem in GLIBC.
• IETF networking standards: For some reasons many IPv6-related standards have serious design flaws that prevent them from working properly.