[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 12:41:02PM -0700, David Braley wrote:
>I had a feeling this was the case. I have read that Debian has some kind
>of tool called "ifrename" that can help to manage this kind of thing,

ifrename is also available on Fedora, all it does is like "mv" but for
network devices.  Fedora uses this in the
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* scripts to make sure that a given
interface (based on MAC address) is always named consistently.  So your
firewall doesn't flop around which device it names at eth0 and eth1 on
every reboot.

>my wireless card), put in my password, it works! So specifying the full
>path does work. Why does Fedora leave out /sbin and /usr/sbin for users?

The sbin directories are supposed to be more for system tools and not
user-level tools.  In general, things in /sbin and /bin are things that are
necessary to get the system booted up to the point where it can mount an
NFS partition, and /usr/sbin and /usr/bin is for other things.

The general idea is that users shouldn't have to configure the network
interface, as part of their regular tasks.  In today's world, with
"ifconfig" doing double-duty as both setting and showing the configuration,
users (particularly on wireless) may need to semi-regularly run iwconfig
and ifconfig...  Those are two of the most common things I find I miss if I
don't have the sbin directories in my path.

Sean
-- 
 If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have
 schizophrenia.  -- Thomas Szasz
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability