Re: Thoughts on network detection and configuration on Debian
David Roundy <droundy@civet.berkeley.edu> writes:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 06:56:30PM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
[...]
> After some thought, I think that perhaps we need three separate tools for
> three separate jobs (but which would, of course, work together). As I see
> it, I have three things that I'd like autoconfiguration tools to be able to
> do:
>
> (1) Detect my network environment and configure networking properly.
>
> (This is reasonably well served by guessnet along with ifupdown, which is
> what I'm using at the moment).
>
> (2) Configure my computer based on location, as in everything else.
>
> In theory this could be done by the same tool as (1), but I think it is
> better to be done by a separate utility, so that those who don't need it
> won't have to worry about the necesary complexity of such a tool.
> Naturally, this should be linked with (1)... this need seems to be served
> best by whereami. For a while I used whereami, but for my purposes at the
> moment it is overkill. Also, preferably tool (2) would be preconfigured to
> work seamlessly with tool (1).
>
> (3) Determine when to redetect my environment and reconfigure.
>
> This tool would detect when you plug in and unplug the ethernet cable,
> would be activated on suspend/resume events, pcmcia cards (if I had
> any...), etc. I imagine this tool would probably consist primarily of
> config scripts in /etc/apm/events.d/ etc., which would then be configured
> to call either (1) or (2) as appropriate.
I think that you should look at spontaneous and Ad Hoc-networks for
ideas for this. It's not only portable computers with ordinary LANs
that needs this. Also computers with different WLANs needs this (IEEE
802.11b and Bluetooth is just two of them).
You should probably also consider IPv6 for this.
See for instance this address <URL:http://www.sics.se/cna/connected/>
and <URL:http://www.sics.se/cna/> for ideas.
So that you don't restrict the infrastructure to much by design.
(I want my mobile phone on the net with IPv6 running Debian and small
application talking to servers that knows where I am and also to my
PC. We are not to far from that. My GPRS phone has IPv4 numbers on a
private LAN, but I want to have full Internet on it)
/Jackson
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