[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 04:22:36PM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> 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.

I wonder why the moment I mention GUIs as a type of tool some
distributions favor everyone seems to think I'm talking exclusively of
GUI tools.

In any case, it's true that, as contrasted with something like Windows
or BeOS, Debian and Fedora are more alike than different.


> 
> >> 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.

I'm still not really clear on how that's dependent upon having a bunch
of separate files for interface configuration.  I'm probably missing
something obvious.  I've grepped for useful information in configuration
files and script output before, even in relation to network startup
scripts and configuration files, before, so there must be some point
you're making that goes beyond that.


> 
> >> 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".

I actually wrote a simple Perl script to manage network configuration
for my girlfriend that just rewrites the interfaces file.  Pretty
simple, and roughly equivalent to:
  echo "foo bar blah whatever" > /etc/network/interfaces
  echo "baz qux blah whatever" > /etc/resolv.conf
  /etc/init.d/networking restart

. . . but with a simple interface that doesn't require remembering the
configuration file syntax, where to find the networking script, or how
to use resolv.conf at all.  I think I wrote the whole thing in about
fifteen minutes, called it nconf, and stuck it in /root/bin for her.

Perhaps I'd have a better idea of what you're accomplishing via a
multiple file arrangement if you contrast it with that.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your
hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid