On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 00:00 +1100, Drew Parsons wrote: > Hi, > > I want to be able to easily change my configuration depending on where I > am (e.g. home/office/cafe). The network interface itself is simply > enough to change, the main issue for me is the mail smarthost server. > If I forget to update /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and restart > exim, then my mails are screwed. The smarthosts typically refuse to > "relay" from outside their own domains. Recipient mail servers may > refuse to accept mail from some random laptop that happens to connect to > it, which is why I want to configure a smarthost. > > The number of alternatives for changing the laptop's configuration is, > frankly, overwhelming. > > Werner's Linux Laptop HOW-TO mentions both netenv and divine. The > divine home page (the netenv link in the HOW-TO is broken) mentions > intuitively. "apt-cache search laptop" adds ifplugd, ifscheme, > laptop-net, laptop-netconf, switchconf, whereami. (OK, some of these > don't do automatic detection, but nevertheless). It's all a bit > ridiculous, really. > > Is there any sense of "best practice"? Are any of these packages proven > to be more reliable than others? Can any be judged to be, *ahem*, > significantly inferior? Or redundant (behaving exactly the same as > another package)? > > Seems to me this area of Debian needs to be cleaned up, would you agree?
Hi Drew,
I, for one, would certainly love to see it cleaned up. I am the author
of whereami, so naturally I use that myself, but some people do find it
a bit arcane, or overkill.
While whereami can autodetect pretty much anything, and scripts can be
added for the things it can't do yet, the biggest hassle I have nowadays
is dealing with wireless LANs without SSID broadcast off in any sane and
reasonable way. At this point a human needs to enter the equation and
make decisions.
I took a look at gnome-network-manager late last year (not in Debian
yet, but should be available in Ubuntu Hoary by now I think), but it
does not work with Atheros cards (at least not AR5212) very well and it
doesn't appear to support any sort of scripting for configuring (e.g.)
proxy, mail, printing and so forth, which I usually find necessary.
I do like the architecture of gnome-network-manager though - using d-bus
to separate the "find the network" as root, from the "choose / configure
the network" as the normal user, and of course that architecture is
somewhat compromised if you then carelessly control a whole bunch of
root-privileged daemons as the normal user!
My preference would be for something roughly along the lines of
gnome-network-manager, but which (a) allowed for some kind of an
automated selection before throwing the choice back to the user, and (b)
allowed some sort of scripting based on the selected network.
One basic rule that I think does work is that where there is a LAN then
don't test for any sort of a WLAN, even if it is an unrecognised one.
This kind of approach goes against the grain for a non-laptop
configuration however, where people generally want to use all available
interfaces at the same time. I think this dichotomy is what makes it
harder to fit laptop usage within the ifup/down framework without some
sort of manual work.
Regards,
Andrew McMillan
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