[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 12:04:59PM -0700, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:45:18 -0700
> perrin at apotheon.com (Chad Perrin) wrote:
> > There's always ifconfig (which can be used to change network
> > configuration as well as to dump configuration to STDOUT).  
> 
> Is there some issue with ifconfig on Fedora/RedHat systems? 
> It seems to work fine for me... 

I never said it wasn't there or didn't work.  Please read previous
messages where I made reference to the way RPM distros tend to encourage
the use of distro-specific tools rather than more universal tools.


> 
> > More to
> > the point, however, the configuration file is fairly standardized and
> > easy to read and understand.  Thus, you can just edit the network
> > configuration directly without having to go through several separate
> > files in several different directories.  Even better, there are
> > manpages in Debian at least for the format of various configuration
> > files, so you don't have to rely on configuration scripts or find
> > some hoary old neckbearded suspenders-wearing UNIX guru circa 1975
> > living in the basement of your local university to figure out what
> > options are available for network configuration files.
> > 
> 
> On my Fedora boxes: 
> /usr/share/doc/initscripts-<packageversion>/sysconfig.txt
> has pretty complete docs on the format of
> the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ files. 

So now I should learn yet another documentation system?  I don't even
like info pages, and at least those are available on every single
major distribution.


> 
> I often just edit those config files directly. 
> I'm not 100% sure when they introduced that format, but the initscripts
> package has been around in redhat since at least 1997. I find it to be
> pretty darn standard... :) 

In Red Hat, sure, it's "standard".  It has also changed internally in
that time, and it's not "standard" for anyone else in the form used by
Fedora/RHEL today.  If you're never going to use anything but
Fedora/RHEL, that may be acceptable, but it gets kind of annoying when
workign in an environment that involves more than one distribution.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary
to shoot the engineers and begin production." - MacUser, November 1990