Bug 357251

Oh, and forgot to credit Dave Jones with the suggestion to just turn off
NetworkManager with

    chkconfig NetworkManager off

which seems to have made my static configuration work fine again.

But if *I* didn't know how to fix this, how would you expect anybody else to
know? Please just fix NetworkManager instead so that it doesn't mess with static
network configurations, even if the network *does* have a DHCP server on it too.

It is in the plans to make NetworkManager handle stuff like static IP's and
multiple network interfaces, hopefully before F9.  The goal for F8 was to redo
the preivously horrible innards of NetworkManager, which is almost done now. 
Another major feature that I heard being discussed is the ability for
NetworkManager to be compatible with ifup/ifdown and
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts configurations.

Until NetworkManager becomes fully usable in these other ways, Fedora 8's normal
install does not enable NetworkManager service by default.  The exception
however is that it is enabled by default if you installed from a LiveCD.

Most of the code to handle static IPs like you want is already in NM 0.7
snapshots in F8; the remaining bits will land and be integrated over the next
month to 6 weeks and made rock-freaking-solid.  These should be able to get
pushed out as F8 updates as well.

Can this bug be assigned to the LiveCD people, so that it doesn't survive? The
LiveCD install is a huge boon (you can fix up issues before installing), but if
it results in an unusable system, then what's the point?

If NetworkManager gets fixed, this may be moot, but if the plan isn't to enable
it by default in the normal install, then it sounds dangerous to make the LiveCD
install be pointlessly totally different.

I can imagine that it makes tons of sense to have NetworkManager enabled on the
LiveCD itself, but that's different from having it enabled in the actual
resulting install..

That's probably reasonable; but I'm not in that loop.  Thoughts, Jeremy?

That completely changes the experience we've had for the past couple of releases
which has been quite good for most users. 

The real bug here is that the NetworkManager bits didn't get finished, but one
part (ignoring devices brought up by the system) is there.

There's no good way for the installer to know that NetworkManager is in use on
an installed system and change its behavior accordingly even if we wanted to
(which is a discussion for another time and place :).  Even just doing something
like skipping the network screen (and thus, removing the fact that you think
you're configuring static bits) on live installs isn't good as not all live
images will be set up to use NetworkManager -- it's a build-time decision by the
builder of the images.

And actually, the 'network' service should be disabled on the live image and
have to be explicitly enabled to make its settings apply anyway (and has been
that way even in F7).  Is this not the case?

I found Network Manager had to be turned off to have a server come up with a
static address.  It was going to be quite a problem to drop off the box at the
ISP and make a visit every time the box is rebooted due to eth0 not being
restored to a static IP number after reboot.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 134886 ***