Re: Thoughts on network detection and configuration on Debian

["Derek Broughton" <derek_broughton@hotmail.com>]

> * Thoughts on network detection and configuration on Debian
>
> There are a lot of packages for automatic network detection and
> reconfiguration on debian: whereami, divine, intuitively,
> laptop-netconf, laptop-net, netenv and maybe others.  IMHO they all have
> a problem: they do network detection AND reconfiguration.  This is a
> problem because Debian already has a way to configure network
> interfaces, provided by the base package ifupdown.

I wouldn't say it's a "problem" - all of those (that I have tried) can
coexist with ifupdown

> ifupdown already provides a way to define configuration profiles, and
> hooks for selecting the good one.  This means that Debian does not need
> a unique tool for network detection AND reconfiguration, but two
> different tools, one for network detection and one for system
> reconfiguration.

True.  guessnet only detects the network and returns a scheme name that you
can use elsewhere.  The examples supplied with it specifically use ifupdown
for reconfiguration.  laptop-net, otoh, detects link-beats (and the other
methods I've tried, don't) but it can't do an arping, so I find myself
having to use two different tools for network detection.