Thursday 24 March 2011

Idea #27250: Auto eth0 isn't very user friendly. Many people wont know what it is.

The Problem

In case you didn't already figure it out, the title refers to a quite popular idea on Ubuntu Brainstorm. It also refers to a bug report against NetworkManager in Launchpad: bug #386900.

This is one issue I'd particularly like to solve soon. Although it most likely won't change for Natty (given that we're in Feature Freeze, and UI Freeze incessantly), I believe the question truly can be brought to a concensus and fixed early in the Oneiric cycle (and actually be made available upstream for everyone's benefit).

I think much of the issues coming from this bug report stem from diverging expectations of people who just care about their wired connection working and likely don't need to change it all that often, and people who actively use NetworkManager's connection profiles to achieve various things.

First, some background:

Why "Auto eth0" ?

The name "Auto eth0" comes from... well, the fact that it's a connection that was created automatically by NetworkManager with the simplest default settings (that is, just use DHCP to set an IP address), and the fact that it was created for the interface eth0. As such, people with multiple wired network cards would then get one "Auto XXXX" profile for each wired card. This profile should take care of 90% of all use cases, since most people will just want their system to be plugged in, their home router to hand over an IP address and be able to get online.

What's this with profiles ?

I just mentioned that the connection names shown are profiles. This is actually very important to me and quite a lot of people, because there are often cases where one would want to use specific network settings when at work and while at home. In other words, one could use "Auto eth0" at home with a simple setup, and benefit from a "At work" profile which sets a static IP address, or different DNS search strings (what would let your computer access "planet", instead of "planet.ubuntu.com" in Firefox, for instance).

Why so many issues ?

I guess this all falls apart when you consider that most people probably won't use alternate profiles for wired connections. DHCP tends to get most things right from the start, which make profiles not very useful unless you want to do very specific things with your connection.

Add to this the fact that not everyone knows that eth0 is what Linux calls your first wired network card (instead of say "Local Area Connection" as I believe it is on Windows), and you have a nice little mess to untangle.

Fixing all of this

I can't say I have all the answers. It's still unclear to me how much information is absolutely required, and I'm well aware that we can't really please everyone.

However, I've added a proposal to the brainstorm idea (Solution #7). It goes like this:
I'm suggesting the name of the profile to be something like "Default". It should not be tied to any particular adapter.
This way, any new connection use that profile which will have default settings to use DHCP and the usual (as Auto eth0 is set). All adapters could share it, so adding a new interface to a computer would still just "work".

For notifications, I suggest the following changes:

- The title should mention "Wired network", and probably the same of the interface (eth0 in most cases).
- The text of the notification should say:

Connection established, using profile "Default"

or whatever profile in use.
Furthermore, perhaps items in the network menu shouldn't list the full details of the network card (it's full name from udev as it does now). Instead, the interface name would be sufficient. I expect people who use multiple cards to know what eth0 and eth1 mean and refer to.

Lastly, drop the "Auto" from user-created wireless network profiles too. Since they are created by the user and carry the name of the wireless network, "Auto" is both unnecessary, and possibly incorrect (since people can change the settings after creating it).

I'd very much like anyone with an opinion on this to vote on Ubuntu Brainstorm for the idea they prefer, and comment with why my suggestion breaks things for them if it does. I certainly could have forgotten things. Comments on this blog are welcome too ;)

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

That sounds like a great topic for a spec and discussion at UDS.

Anonymous said...

biosdevname is coming in Natty so 'eth0' may really be something more hardware-specific soon.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/biosdevname/+bug/723870

Matt Trudel said...

Yeah, I tested this on my system... Not sure it's quite what I expected though, as here it returns pci1p2; although it's a laptop with only one ethernet port on the back (Dell Vostro V130).

Regardless, I think this isn't so much of an issue, as whatever device name that is available to NM via the kernel or udev is what would be presented as an "interface name". In this sense, it's actually also helping our users have clear names for the actual port this uses. It's the whole purpose of biosdevname.

Anonymous said...

I did not know there was a Brainstorm item for this. I have already specified that a wired connection should be labelled “Wired Connection” if there’s only one, or “Wired Connection (eth0)” in the rare case that there is more than one.

Matt Trudel said...

That's how it works in the nm-applet menu, except device names (model and such) are used instead of interface name when there is more than one device. I mention changing this to interface names for brevity.

Anonymous said...

Is there any link with this spec ? https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Networking

Matt Trudel said...

@winniemiel05,

Yup, this was what mpt was referring to in his comment ;)