[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 02:10:07PM -0700, Chad Perrin wrote:
>I think you're probably getting a more intense impression of my
>complaints than I intend, simply because I've been backed into having to

Ok, fair enough.  But the more I read of this thread, the more I think that
there really isn't a concrete difference between Fedora and Debian.  In
Debian you can edit /etc/network/interfaces, in Fedora you can edit
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$DEVICE.  When you get right down to
it, they're fairly similar.  There are some small technical details (like
one file versus many, parser requirements, richness of functionality), but
I don't think it's fair to say that with either one you really have to do
it via a GUI or not.  Both options are available for both.

>> particularly like the decision, but I do end up making use of it to see
>> exactly what is happening when I specify particular directives in the
>> config scripts.
>
>How, exactly?  I'm a little curious about that, and would like to learn
>something about it if there's some benefit to be gained from the
>arrangement that I haven't yet seen.

If I'm in the network-scripts directory and I want to see what is happening
during startup for VLANs, I can "grep vconfig *" and find the exact code
that is running for the VLAN configuration.  Now, for someone who is
unfamiliar with shell scripts, this may not provide particularly useful,
but for me it's as good or possibly better than reading the documentation
on the configuration directives...  Sometimes a screen full of code is
better than a thousand words.

I have also done:

   exec >/tmp/ifup.out 2>&1
   set -xv

to see where something has gone wrong in a network startup script.  I don't
recall the exact issues I've done that for, but seeing the exact commands
that were running was NICE, when things just silently failed.  Maybe the
Debian parser may have made it less likely that would have happened, hard
to say...  Getting a trace of what was going on was nice to have as an
option though.

>> In Debian they designed their own config file format, and so any tools
>> dealing with it have to use a customized parser for it.  In Fedora, they
>> used shell environment definitions and use the shell to parse it.  A good
>> decision, IMHO.
>
>I can see the value of the benefits you describe, but I don't see how
>that necessitates using separate files for each interface.

It may not, if Debian provided a "postconf"-like tool for "editing" the
config file.  However, as another example, removing the configuration for
eth0 on Debian isn't simple.  It could probably be done with a few lines of
awk and work most of the time.  For Fedora, it's "rm
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0".

Having the files split out makes it extremely easy.  It also means that
they can use the shell to parse it.  They could make a unified config file
in shell using some advanced bash features like arrays, but I imagine that
would potentially be problematic (like the Asterisk extensions.conf
sequence field that you had to manually increment), and would be far less
elegant than the current solution.  IMHO.

Thanks,
Sean
-- 
 "I want to see more of you around the lab."  "Fine.  I'll gain weight."
                 -- Chris Knight, _Real_Genius_
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability