Re: Bug#118996: ITP: guessnet -- Guess what network is connected to an ethernet device (can be used as a "script" for ifupdown)

[Enrico Zini <zinie@cs.unibo.it>]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 02:50:36AM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:

> | It has been written to be coupled with the debian ifupdown package to achieve
> | automatic network detection and configuration, but it can be used stand-alone
> | to implement smart network scripts.
> 
> Don't we have enough of those soon?
> 
> whereami - Automatically reconfigure your (laptop) system for a new location
> divine - Automatic IP configuration detection for laptops
> intuitively - Automatic IP configuration detection for laptops
> netenv - Configure your system for different network environments.
> 
> and probably some more.

I understand your concerns, I know about them and I've tried them all.
There's laptop-netconf, too.  The problem is none of them integrates
easily with the existing Debian network configuration; guessnet does.

I'll explain better: with ifupdown, that is AFAIK the standard Debian
network configuration, you have a way in /etc/network/interfaces to
specify different configurations for a network interface, and to use an
external command to choose the right one.

Then we have three packages with a wonderful network detection routine
[1], but none of them can be used as that external command.

For this reason, having a laptop and wanting to stay as close to the
debian way as possible, I've just insulated their detection code and put
it in a simple and small command that does the job, following the Unix
tradition of doing things.

Given guessnet, you probably could reimplement divine, intuitively and
laptop-netconf with simple shell scripts, but it would be a mess to use
them to provide a shell script that does for ifupdown what guessnet does.


Bye, Enrico


[1] netenv does not, since it requires the user to specify the
configuration profile, while whereami provide hooks for external scripts,
but doesn't provide anything for automatic network detection besides dhcp.

Since guessnet performs only network detection and not network configuration,
it can also fill this gap in netenv.  This can be a good idea for some
doc/examples file in guessnet, now that I think about it.
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>