NetworkManager plugin?

[dark-penguin]

Hi!
Thank you very much for this project; I thought I was going to be SOL using Linux at my new job, but I found this, and it "just works"! ❤️

I have a pretty bold suggestion/request - but who knows, maybe it would turn out possible: it would be really cool to have this as a NetworkManager plugin.

Why?

• There would be no need to maintain a GUI since NetworkManager already has every capability you can think of, and then some.
• Configuration would be "familiar" for those who is already using other supported VPN types. Having only one familiar "network" icon in the notification area is a minor plus.
• Seems like it can do a lot of things on its own, like assigning addresses, injecting DNS resolvers, etc.
• Most importantly for me, NetworkManager now has this cool capability to inject DNS resolvers and zones into dnsmasq, in order to avoid touching resolv.conf . This way, I can have multiple per-zone resolvers, instead of querying VPN-provided resolvers first, getting NXDOMAIN from them for my other local zones, and therefore being unable to access the rest of my network.

I don't know if it's possible to write a plugin in Rust though. Could be a "fun" project, or could be unpleasant/impossible.

Here's one example I've found; a plugin for IPSec (StrongSWAN) that seems to be just a wrapper - so a similar plugin could replace the GUI but still use the Rust implementation under the hood.
https://download.strongswan.org/NetworkManager/

Oh, but I don't know if it supports popup windows for MFA challenges... I've been previously using OpenVPN with MFA, but they had a "hacky" setup where your MFA code had to be appended to your password, and it was only checked once in a while, so it was not a big problem. Here, your MFA is going to be checked every time, so such a solution wouldn't work. But I was able to reach NetworkManager developers (for an unrelated issue), so maybe they could add the necessary capability on their part, or suggest how to do it if it's already there.

More plugins can be found here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/NetworkManager/VPN

[ancwrd1]

That would be nice to have as an additional module but I am not familiar with NM architecture, and it requires a significant time investment. May be someone else could look into it in the near future.