[NCLUG] RH networking scripts

[S. Luke Jones]

Those of you who use Red Hat for serious systems -- I mean,
commercial and enterprise customers of RH and its derivatives,
as distict from bottom-feeding home workstation types like me.
Do you use the networking scripts that RH supplies? And if not,
what procedure do you use to avoid them?

I wonder, because I've come to the conclusion that they're
beyond redemption. The theory appears to be that the scripts
let everything plug into the /etc/rc.d/init.d infrastructure
so networking's complexities (physical layer, etc.) are all
abstracted away.

A noble goal, to be sure, but poorly excuted, IMHO. The net
result is to change one file with a dozen or two "ifconfig",
"route", and "ifwadm" / "ipchains" / "iptables" commands with
several hundred lines of bash scripts.

(And not the best quality bash scripts, if you ask me. I don't
see why [ -f file ] && { foo ; bar ; baz; } is so much more
readable than if [ -f file ] ; then foo; bar; baz ; fi. Given
the reliance on environment variables sourced from other files
it might be reasonable to document what variables are expected
and what values they might have. But that would require the
author to provide a man page, and Red Hat seems to have a
major aversion to man pages for the commands they create.
Anyway, it's a hopeless mass of files that call one another
(sometimes calling a binary to invoke themselves again --
it isn't clear to me whether it's to add privileges or just
to daemonize themselves, and I got bored watching ltrace
output).

So I've decided to quit using RH's networking.  Since I'm
behind a 56k dialup -- forever, pending action by Qwest or
@Home -- I'd like to keep using KRUD, which is why I ask how
hard it is defeat Red Hat's value add.

I'm semi-offline these days -- which is why I'm monkeying
around with RH's network files in the first place -- so
please send your responses to clutter up the list and I'll
read the archive from a public web terminal somewhere
(starts with "w" and rhymes with jerk).

-- 
Luke Jones = luke/vortex/frii/fullstop/com