Bug#118996: ITP: guessnet -- Guess what network is connected
On Sat, Nov 10, 2001 at 08:21:57AM -0800, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> > * Package name : guessnet
> > Version : 0.9
> > Upstream Author : Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
> > * URL : http://www.students.cs.unibo.it/~zinie/en/guessnet
> > * License : GPL
> > Description : Guess what network is connected to an ethernet device
> > (can be used as a "script" for ifupdown)
> >
> > Based on the network detecting code of laptop-netconf, guessnet tries
> > to guess what network an ethernet device is currently connected to,
> > using fake ARP requests.
> >
> > It has been written to be coupled with the debian ifupdown package to achieve
> > automatic network detection and configuration, but it can be used stand-alone
> > to implement smart network scripts.
>
> You realize we already have THREE (maybe four) different packages which do this
> in Debian right now.
Of course I do, but this is the only one that integrates with the existing
Debian network configuration.
You have a way in /etc/network/interfaces to specify different
configurations for a network interface, and to use an external command to
choose the right one. Then you have THREE (maybe four) packages with a
wonderful network detection routine, but NONE OF THEM can be used as that
external command.
For this reason, having a laptop and wanting to stay as close to the
debian way as possible, I've just insulated their detection code and put
it in a simple and small command that does the job, following the Unix
tradition of doing things.
Given guessnet, you could reimplement all the other similar packages with
simple shell scripts (it could be an interesting idea for an examples
directory, now that I think about it), but it would be a mess to use the
other packages to provide a shell script that does for ifupdown what
guessnet does.
Bye, Enrico
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@debian.org>
Reply to: