[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: DHCP for PCMCIA interface: Being Canonical



Bruce <bestb@sympatico.ca> writes:
> I have a wireless (SMC 2632W) PCMCIA network card on my laptop which runs 
> Debian/Sid.

(This is important.)

> Works great, once up. However, I do have to manually "pump -i wlan0"
> for it to get its address from the friendly neighbourhood DHCP
> server.
...
> I could probably hobble together some script to "get this working", without 
> too much troble but I know that whatever I come up with will not be the 
> canonical solution. 
>
> What is the canonical Debian way to get your pcmcia (wireless) card to fetch 
> it's IP from a DHCP server on boot?

In Debian unstable (and possibly in testing), the PCMCIA setup will
fall back to running 'ifup wlan0' or whatever if there's not explicit
configuration in /etc/pcmcia/* for the network card.  I think this is
great, personally.  :-)  In your case, then, the thing to do is to add
to /etc/network/interfaces

  # No 'auto wlan0'!
  iface wlan0 inet dhcp

...and you should be set.

------------------------------------

My actual setup is a bit more complicated.  I use guessnet to bring
myself up on a couple of known static addresses, and there are
services (most notably the Zephyr host manager, zhm) that become
really unhappy without network.  So I actually have an
/etc/network/interfaces.m4, which I process with m4 to create the
actual interfaces file.  I also have a chunk of Perl that outputs a
set of interfaces lines for a CIDR-style network declaration; if I
call the script with "18.208.0.22/16" as a parameter, it will output
correct address, netmask, broadcast, and gateway lines (using MIT's
convention of using the first address in the block, e.g. 18.208.0.1,
as the gateway).  I should put the actual infrastructure on the Web
somewhere; the net result, though, is that I wind up with a file that
looks like

  mapping eth0
          script /usr/bin/guessnet
          map 18.101.2.57 00:60:XX:XX:XX:XX 18.101.2.49 eth0-home
          map 18.208.0.22 00:E0:XX:XX:XX:XX 18.208.0.1 eth0-et

  iface eth0-home inet static
          INTERFACE(18.101.2.57/28)
          up ifconfig eth0 mtu 1480
          SERVICE(zhm)

  QUIKSERV(eth0-et, 18.208.0.22/16)

  iface eth0-none inet dhcp
          SERVICE(zhm)

Useful packages to have installed are 'guessnet' and
'libnet-netmask-perl'; useful documentation includes interfaces(5) and
'info m4'.

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org



Reply to: