I have written and collected some network testing scripts in a new
'ifupdown-extra' package which is right now available in
http://people.debian.org/~jfs/ifupdown-extra
This package provides additional scripts for ifupdown to test for some common
problems when setting up interfaces:
- interfaces without a link (admin can have that condition abort interface
setup if he wants the behaviour described in #120382)
- duplicate IP addresses in the network
- setup static routes
- detect unreachable network gateways (could be expanded to detect
unreachable local network servers)
These scripts will run when you ifup an interface and will warn you of these
issues (standard error and/or syslog). It also provides the network-test
script which currently resides in the debian-goodies package.
The main reason for this package is that, even if I took over debian-goodies
and introduced 'network-test' there, I don't want to pollute its dependencies
with lots of IP utilities just to have that testing script work. I've thought
that the best way is to move it over to some other package even if that means
adding a (versioned) Conflict: to debian-goodies.
Here's the control file:
Package: ifupdown-extra
Architecture: all
Depends: iproute, iputils-ping, netcat, arping, ethtool, net-tools, bind9-host
Conflicts: debian-goodies (<= 0.25)
Description: Network scripts for ifupdown
This package provides a set of network testing scripts to be used together
with the ifupdown package. These scripts can:
- check the network cable before an interface is configured
- test if an assigned IP address is already in use in the network
- test if default network gateways are reachable
- setup default static routes for interfaces
.
This package also provides 'network-test', a script to test the network
configuration status by checking:
- Interface status
- Availability of configured gateway routes
- Proper host resolution (DNS checks)
- Proper network connectivity, including ICMP and web connections to
remote web servers.
Could some of you test this package and tell me what you think of it?
Javier
PS: Funnily, it seems that SuSE does have the ARP ping test in their if-up.d
directory whilease Fedora/Red Hat does not have anything like that. Even
though that test will introduce a small delay on bootup I think it's worth it
(and users can easily disable it through /etc/default/network-test)
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