Background: * It's desirable to have just once nice, new, modern codepath for network configuration. * many enterprise and cloud configurations do not need the features that a running network manager daemon provide * regardless of whether there is really a practical impact, many professional sysadmins have a strong aversion to the idea of a daemon running to control the network (especially when it's perceived as adding no value). Request: Please add a "oneshot" mode, where NetworkManager starts, reads the on-disk configuration files, applies any needed changes, and then exits. This will make it much less painful to replace the legacy network configuration scripts, and will make our sysadmin constituents happy. They may even grow to love NetworkManager.
In the Fedora Cloud images, NetworkManager is the second-largest single thing running by default -- the largest being dhclient. It has an RSS of 6.6M, and a unique (not shared libs) footprint of about 3.4M. That's pretty small, but if we're trying to squeeze into a very small instance, every bit counts — and, if we multiply by a large number of running instances, it adds up.
We also need to cover the simple dhcp-on-one-network case -- nothing fancy, but something needs to renew the DHCP leases. The run-once mode should also be able to configure that, just as initscripts networking does now. (I can make that a separate RFE if that's easier.)
Untested code for the static use-case is in dcbw/rh863515-rh1083683-config-then-quit
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database. Reassigning to the new owner of this component.
This was implemented in NM 1.0, which is in F22. 'man NetworkManager.conf' and search for configure-and-quit.