Re: ifplugd, guessnet, ifscheme, netscript, whereami, ... -- what should I use?

[Matej Cepl <cepl@surfbest.net>]

Andrew McMillan wrote:
> I confess to failing to understand what "compatible with ifupdown" means
> when people ask for it.  Whereami will get your network going, but it
> will use what it sees as the first appropriate available interface (most
> people want wired first, then wireless, then weirder things...) and
> AFAICS ifupdown doesn't play nicely with that, so the best configuration
> for whereami is usually to let ifupdown handle 127.0.0.1 and let
> whereami look after the rest.

I was using whereami for some time, but when the guessnet and
ifupdown-roaming came up, I happily switched. The reason is simple -- there
are too many other packages which rely on ifupdown working as intended.
dnsmasq, resolvconf, masqmail (although I have left that lately), and I am
quite sure I forgot couple of others. Now, I could make all these programs
to work with the environment as created by whereami or replace them with my
own shell/python creatures, but what's the point when guessnet,
ifupdown-roaming, etc. are more than sufficient for me (BTW, even when I
had whereami installed, I was not able to make its exim support work
properly -- I forgot what was the problem, it was couple of years ago)?

> Well I don't think that's particularly a solution either, as I don't
> think it passes the "My grandmother could do that" test, since it
> requires root access for one thing.

How do you know that my mother (five months being a grandmother of our
daughter) has problems with computers? :-)). No, the problem for me is not
about my grandmother, but about myself. Although I am certainly able to
make this work (with little help from people on this and other lists ...),
the reason why I switched from RedHat (many years ago, so I am not saying
anything about the current state of RH) to Debian, was that in Debian
things just worked. Not only that all packages were working together and
stomping on each others toes (which RH could in that time just dream
about), but everything (OK, mostly everything) was covered with
configuration scripts which make installation and configuration of the
system so simple (I never understood why people complained about difficult
installation of Debian -- it always seemed to me much less complicated than
RedHat then; although some people probably understand "anything in text
mode" to be complicated beyond anybody's comprehension and mouse-driven
programs automagically easy to use).

Being so spoiled by the rest of the system, it is even more painful to meet
these warts -- configuration of laptop networking being one of them).

> Last time I checked it simply wasn't going to work in Debian (wrong
> Gnome version or something - I don't recall exactly) but that probably
> isn't the case now.

Well, this is KDE-prefering computer, so I will wait until all this beauty
will be ported to KDE. And yes, I will have to probably wait on KDE based
on D-BUS. Oh well.

        Best,

                Matej

-- 
Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej
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