Bug 547327

Summary: Bridge configuration: adapt bridge ports instead of remove their configurations
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.2 Reporter: Casual J. Programmer <casualprogrammer>
Component: YaST2Assignee: Michal Zugec <mzugec>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Jiri Srain <jsrain>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Milestone 8   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86   
OS: SUSE Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---
Attachments: screenshot of situation (yast2 lan)

Description Casual J. Programmer 2009-10-15 16:34:33 UTC 
User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090909 SUSE/3.5.3-1.3 Firefox/3.5.3

Setting up a network bridge is somewhat clumsy in Linux, yast2 does a good job in guifying the process. 

I think it can still be improved.

As it is, in yast2 lan one can see a list of NICs in the overview tab, help doesn't really help, so by trying add, one finds that a Network Bridge can be added, also NICs selected to participate get reset (including autorization data for wlan)

Alas the rest is up to the user, who has to dig around the Internet for more or less questionable information to finally meet the goal, somehow.

My suggestion is to let yast2 perform _all_ necessary steps for ease of use and absence of confusion.

It's only really setting the ip and netmask of the participating NICs to 0.0.0.0/255.255.255.255, that's pretty much it.

A Description of the complete process should be presented in the help window.

A good example of user friendlyness is the much despised Windows, one just highlights all participating NICs (holding down CTL) and, in the context menu (right click) selects bridge connections, thats it. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1 Michal Zugec 2009-10-27 09:54:46 UTC 
I agree with you, but the problem is limited time. We have a lot to do but we accept patches from comunity. 
Anyway YaST should accept interface with 0.0.0.0/32 configuration. Could you confirm this?
Comment 2 Casual J. Programmer 2009-10-27 10:33:32 UTC 
The problem is not YaST not accepting the 0.0.0.0/32 configuration, rather it lets the user in the dark about this necessity.

What it currently does, if a bridge is configured and the participating NICs are confifured otherwise, it simply brings up a message box, stating that "At least one selected device is already configured. Remove the configuration ? Cancel/Continue". Continue resets (deletes) the existing configuration (including the authorization part of the WLAN), cancel returns to the bridge interface selection.

Instead of resetting the configuration, it could just go ahead and configure the selected NICs to 0.0.0.0/32 and check that bridge and selected NICs have identical MTU settings.
Comment 3 Casual J. Programmer 2009-10-27 10:34:25 UTC 
Created attachment 324279 [details]
screenshot of situation (yast2 lan)
Comment 4 Casual J. Programmer 2009-10-27 10:34:49 UTC 
.
Comment 5 Michal Zugec 2009-10-27 10:36:47 UTC 
Ok, I understand now
Comment 6 Michal Zugec 2009-11-13 16:09:52 UTC 
implemented in yast2-network-2.18.60
too late for oS11.2, submitted into Factory