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Re: Debian netbase 3.17-1 init.d scripts



Anthony Towns wrote:
> Patches (both for the manpage, and for the code) gratefully accepted.

Aj, ifupdown is a nice peice of work. Impressive that you used literate
programming, and I really like the .defin files. I really think all that is
needed is a man page that gives an example and says what all the fields in
the file are for, followed by the docs that are so cleverly generated from
the .defn files. So here it is:

.\" -*- nroff -*-
.TH INTERFACES 5 "February 24 2000" "ifupdown" "File formats"
.SH NAME
/etc/network/interfaces \- network interface configuration for ifup and ifdown 
.SH DESCRIPTION
/etc/network/interfaces contains network interface configuration
information for the
.BR ifup (8)
and
.BR ifdown (8)
commands. This is where you configure how your system is connected to the
network, by setting IP addresses, and other related information.
.P
The file can contain comments; all lines starting with `#' are ignored.
.P
The file consists of one or more "iface" stanzas, each of which defines one
network interface. Here is a sample stanza:

 iface eth0 inet static
 	address 192.168.1.1
 	netmask 255.255.255.0

Stanzas always start with the word "iface". The next word is the name of the
interface, as used by the
.BR ifconfig (8)
or
.BR route (8)
commands (ie, things like "eth0", or "ppp0", and "eth1:0").
.P
The interface name is followed by address family the interface uses --
generally this will be "inet" for TCP/IP networking, but there is also support
for IPX networking ("ipx"), and IPv6 networking ("inet6").
.P
Following that is the method used to configure the interface. In the example
above, this is "static", which means that eth0 is a static IPv4 address.
.P
Most methods require additional information, such as address, and netmask;
that information follows the "iface" header line on additional lines in the
stanza (TODO: is this right, or is it more free-form and that don't need to
be on new lines?). Details about the available methods and the information
they require follows.
##ADDRESSFAM##
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR ifup (1)
.BR ifdown (1)
.SH AUTHOR
Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>


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