interfaces, mapping, etc

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Hey aj, I want to make sure I'm approaching this right. And I'm kinda making
it up as I go, so please bear with me. 

This wlan-ng foo wants to have a /etc/init.d/wlan script that starts the
interface, but that is braindead for many reasons on debian, so:

auto wlan0
mapping wlan0
        script /usr/local/bin/map-scheme
        map home wlan0-home
        map managed wlan0-managed

iface wlan0-home inet static
        pre-up /usr/share/wlan-ng/start wlan0-home
        address 192.168.1.5
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        down /usr/share/wlan-ng/stop
        
iface wlan0-managed inet dhcp
        pre-up /usr/share/wlan-ng/start wlan0-managed
        down /usr/share/wlan-ng/stop

I want to make sure this is a sane way to expect mappings to be used though.
The whole mappings thing is a bit well, undocumented. Would it make sense to
have a centralized program to return the current scheme for scheme-based setups
like this one? I'm thinking of something equivilant to cardctl scheme.
It would be really easy to write, I imagine; just something to cat a value
to and from someplace in /var.

Also do you mind if other network related packages puts configuration stuff in
/etc/network? In this case it would be some kind of specification of the
wireless network parmaters for wlan-ng, hopefully in a interfaces-like file
format.

Finally, is there any way for a script in one of the if-*.d directories to know
what interface is coming up/down? If there were I could simplify the
network/interfaces stanzas some by making that script handle the wlan-ng stuff
for the wlan* interfaces. Is the IFACE and IF_* in the environment part of
the interface to these scripts, and if so, why is it not documented?

Oh hmm, even if those variables are documented to use, I don't see any way to
get at the mapped name of the interface (wlan0-home, wlan0-managed, whatever).
So I'd like to be able to put this in if-pre-up.d, but I cannot see any way to
do it:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
case "$IFACE" in
wlan*)
        /usr/share/wlan-ng/start $IFACE_MAPPED
;;
esac

I could make it run the /usr/local/bin/map-scheme but that
is not a well-defined program name, and it might be expensive
to run. Help?

-- 
see shy jo


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