[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#762740: No network devices available

[Michal Hocko]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 04:05:13PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote:
[...]
> The log still claims there are not unmanaged devices:
> Oct 11 15:32:54 tiehlicka NetworkManager[22665]:    Ifupdown: get unmanaged devices count: 0
> Oct 11 15:32:54 tiehlicka NetworkManager[22665]:    SCPlugin-Ifupdown: (7663376) ... get_connections.
> Oct 11 15:32:54 tiehlicka NetworkManager[22665]:    SCPlugin-Ifupdown: (7663376) ... get_connections (managed=false): return empty list.
> [...]
> Oct 11 15:32:54 tiehlicka NetworkManager[22665]:    Ifupdown: get unmanaged devices count: 0

OK, now that I am looking into the code I guess I finally got
it. This should be really unrelated. Because NM (SCPlugin) just
parses /etc/network/interfaces file and collects all the existing
configurations there to make them available via NM as well, right? As I
didn't have any predefined configurations there are no connection to
manage.

So this really smells like something dbus/policykit related. I have
looked at nmcli source and it seems that do_devices_status gets the
devices (which I assume should represent physical network devices) from
        nmc->get_client (nmc);
	devices = nm_client_get_devices (nmc->client);
where get_client should be nmc_get_client which in turn should call
nm_client_new which but then I lost the trail because it is hidden by
glib magic:
        client = g_object_new (NM_TYPE_CLIENT,
                               NM_OBJECT_DBUS_CONNECTION, connection,
                               NM_OBJECT_DBUS_PATH, NM_DBUS_PATH,
                               NULL);

Anyway the help text mentions that nm_client_new is doing a blocking
D-BUS but dbus-monitor is silent when I execute `nmcli dev status'.
This would suggest that the DBUS communication hasn't happened.
policykit which I assume is doing the permission checking is running
and I do not see any complains in the log.

I am not really familiar with all this so I might be looking at
completely wrong places so I would really appreciate some hints how to
debug this more.

Thanks
-- 
Michal Hocko