[NCLUG] RH networking scripts

Mike Loseke mike at verinet.com
Tue Oct 30 09:01:31 MST 2001


Thus spake S. Luke Jones:
> Mike Loseke wrote:
> > Thus spake S. Luke Jones:
> > > ... I've come to the conclusion that they're
> > > beyond redemption. ...
> > 
> >  I'm curious as to what issues you're having that would cause you to need
> > to replace the scripts provided. True, RedHat has probably over-engineered
> > some of their scripts but they work pretty good. They took the SysV init
> > method and kind of perverted it, but with current releases they are falling
> > more inline with the mainstream (i.e. Solaris). They even have /etc/init.d
> > linked to /etc/rc.d/init.d now.
> 
> Well, this isn't the time or place to attack the SysV init mechanism.
> I dislike the directories-full-of-symlinks ... but I like having a
> single script /etc/rc.d/init.d/foo that I can use to start/stop/restart
> or get the current status of the "foo" service, without being an
> expert user of "foo".
> 
> My posting was designed to find out what others do with the RH scripts.
> Apparently, people keep them.  By this I meant the stuff in
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, not the related stuff in /etc/rc.d/*.

 Ah. I'll agree with you there, I don't like how RedHat has ripped out
things from the init scripts (yes, I like them) and obfuscated them into
little goofy config files and seperate start/stop scripts. Nothing wrong
with having the inetinit and inetsvc init scripts figure out all that
information on their own (referring to Solaris here).

 The Solaris scripts figure that stuff out on their own without hardcoding
anything (except for a hostname per interface like /etc/hostname.hme0).
Subnets, gateways, all that hooha is determined by the information relative
to the IP address of that hostname (from /etc/hosts) from those files which
normally contain all that stuff. This is a big benny in large environments
when you may have the need to move machines between networks frequently.

 LDAP is just gonna make it easier too.

> Well. To each his own.
> 
> I have an axe to grind: I just took a virgin 10/2001 KRUD machine and
> spent several hours trying to set up ppp to connect to frii.  Old-timers
> on this list know I'm networking-challenged, and that ppp (and my
> personal nemesis, sendmail) have been, uh, topics of my rants in the
> past. But in this case I had a working system to start with, and
> wvdial is incontestably better (i.e. more idiot-proof) than chat.

 Well, you did mention originally that you were directing the question at
large and production server folks - that rules out ppp for the most part.
:-) Last time I used ppp I did write some custom scripts to get it running
though, I didn't rely on redhat's stuff. Of course I was doing some
dial-on-demand with some cronned initiation and mail gets, stuff like that.


> Another reason I asked the "prosumer" RH-admins what they did
> was because RH seems to think people administer their systems
> using Gnome-based GUI tools. I've always been surprised at how
> difficult it is to install a RH system without X and it would
> increasingly appear that Gnome will be required too.

 I hate gnome/kde. The only reason they're even installed on my workstations
is that I sometimes run an app or two that was linked against those libs.
I rather prefer running a window manager (and only a window manager, not
microsoft bob) that takes up only 828K of memory (even after 55 days) -
fvwm2 baby! yah! I currently have 46 xterms running on this machine (which
is below average, but the machine's only been up 55 days), and I've found
many pretty/heavy wm's don't deal with that very well. Not all, but some.
Last time I tried this with kde, it felt like I was back in Romper Room
or something, pushing big fat blocks around on a not-very-well-managed
virtual desktop setup.

 The thing I particularly dislike about kde/gnome is that they are at the
same time the reason good competition exists in the arena we find ourselves
in and the reason linux will never win the desktop. Until they merge, or
borgify themselves, similar to how the big Unix's did with CDE, they aren't
going to gain any ground. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be
wrong.


> As for the scripts themselves, I gave an example of what I
> consider poor coding style, but I suppose there is room for
> disagreement about these things. I sometimes use && for an

 Good discussion trimmed. Frankly, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
You could always clean the scripts up and submit them to redhat as a patch.
:-)


> 
> Since we've established that people use the RH initscripts
> and since I finally roused myself to (locate and) RTFM, my
> next question would be, what do you prosumer-types use to
> administer your RH initscripts for headless server boxes?

 vi. Remember, initscripts aren't doing anything magical, they are just
shell scripts and are using standard system tools. The man pages for those
tools are your best reference.

-- 
   Mike Loseke    | Disk space running short.
 mike at verinet.com | Deleting emacs...



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