portable, Anyone using network profiles ?

Apologies if I posted this here before,
but is anyone using the network profile system
through the programs Start=>System Settings=>Network
and Start=>System Tools=>Network Device Control ?

I've been trying it for a few days,
and it seems almost unusable.

The idea, as far as I can see,
is that you should be able to set up two or more "profiles",
each of which has different network settings,
to allow the use of a laptop at different locations.

In my experience the system simply does not work.
To start with, I now have to "sudo system network restart"
whenever I logon, although the default Common profile
is supposed to be activated at bootup.

Also if one makes changes to one profile
it changes the other too.

Sometimes when I logon, the system name is lost,
or rather changed to localhost,
which with my setup prevents me getting email.

The whole thing seems to be a mess,
which makes me wonder if anyone is using it?

I should say that I am using KDE-3.3.0 under FC3-test2
I'm not really sure if my complaint is about KDE or Fedora.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

/me ponders if this is a laptop forum or a touchy-feely gui one :P

Well if you really want to be able to do something serious in relation to
networking and general environment profiles you are going to have to use a
that old terminal thang.

I would highly recommend you install a package called 'whereami'. With this,
when it is run, it goes through a number of tests to work out where it is and
then it can configure your machine to behave in the way you want it to for
that environment; all automagically.

For example on my laptop I have it so that it sends out a bunch of arp
requests and if the MAC address for an IP pops back (for example the MAC
address of the network card on a router) my laptop knows its at home/work or
a friends house. Others also throw in tests to see if an external monitor or
USB mouse is present and/or configure those too.

Pretty much limitless your options with 'whereami'. To be frank I would dump
the KDE tools[1] and go for this approach instead; its dead easy to use.

yeah, its a touchy-feely posting...

Cheers

Alex

[1] pah, I would suggest KDE (and Fedora I would say) along with it too :) On
a laptop you really should run the least cpu intensive UI you can get
away with; for me its 'fluxbox'. KDE eats CPU cycles like its a C
compiler or something


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I have actually downloaded and looked at whereami, guessnet and ifplugd.

But the system-config-network profile setup looks as though it would be
perfectly adequate for me, if only it worked properly.
The point is, I only need to consider two locations.
I would be perfectly happy to choose a different kernel in grub
according to my location, if that would work.


I'll have another look at whereami.
It seemed a little too elaborate for my simple needs.
I was actually using a diy system of my own,
which just looks to see if it can hear my desktop.
But I thought if the Linux guys have done the job,
it should be better than anything I can put together.

Anyway, I'm still interested to know if anyone is actually using
the Network Device Control system which is in my Fedora-2 main menu.



--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Well, you likely mean a different grub menu line instead of
"a different kernel".

That is actually really trivial to achieve; with grub or lilo or any
other boot loader you want to use. The trick is that kernel ignores
unrecognized arguments but they are still available through
'/proc/cmdline'. So you can add to your normal boot commands stuff like
NET0, NET1 and so on and give some meaningful names to corresponding
menu entries. Now the only thing you need is an extra startup script,
which you run before network configuration scripts, and which looks in
/proc/cmdline for your identifiers and depending on what was found
copies a different prepared set of network parameters files. That could
be as little as /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, and
/etc/resolv.conf and may include other things (/etc/sysconfig/network,
/etc/hosts, /etc/mail/sendmail.cf, printers configuration, whatever else
you may need/want). Works very well and you have a total control on how
much or how little you want to adjust. As long as you do not have so
many kernel parameters that you are on the lenght limit of your kernel
command line, so you cannot fit there one more argument, works without
any muss or fuss.

There is a catch. Scripts used in kernel updates will edit out
from grub.conf all your "unneeded" entries. So you need to keep
a copy of that file and after updates used it, and some editor,
to restore your setup. That is about it.

Network profiles also do work to some extent; but a setup is really
counterintuive even if documented somewhere (I do not remember now
where). Moreover a one click in a wrong moment can overwrite one
profile with another while you never intended to do such thing.
A while ago I filed a bugzilla report describing this problem.

Michal

The netenv package in Debian (stable aka Woody) provides exactly this
functionality and I use it all the time. I have lilo entries for office,
home, dhcp, presentation, dialup, ...

--
Eric S Fraga, Chemical Engineering@UCL www.ucl.ac.uk/chemeng/staff/fraga.html
........@@@@@@.@@@.@.@@.@.@...@..@@@.@@@.@@.@.....@.@..@@@.@@@.@.............

You don't need the netenv package to get pcmcia schemes to work. I
created schemes before for pcmcia network drivers and I could choose a
linux kernel admittedly using lilo which corresponds to the need I have
when I take my debian laptop somewhere. I actually don't even use the
schemes support any longer since I just use ifup and ifdown commands and
have wireless and wired interfaces "stacked" in /etc/network/interfaces
the way I want them. As an example, my debian Dell laptop travels to a
few different places like Borders Books with tmobile access, home with a
dhcp managed network, work with a dhcp managed network, and another work
assignment with static IP addresses. When I get to the place I want, I
just do ifdown eth1 ifup eth1=work and I get the right settings for that
interface. I actually rarely reboot the laptop these days since either
of my laptops work with either APM or ACPI really well. The ifup and
ifdown things save me a lot of time overall. Here's a snippet of a
/etc/network/interfaces file I use a bit:

# The first network card - this entry was created during the Debian
# installation
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

iface home inet dhcp
wireless-essid xxxxxx
wireless-key yyyyy

iface tmobile inet dhcp
wireless-essid tmobile

iface work inet dhcp
wireless-essid aaaaa
wireless-key bbbbbbb


With a few declarations in my /etc/network/interfaces file, I just ifup
whatever one I want.

--
Michael Perry | do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda
XXXX@XXXXX.COM | http://www.lnxpowered.org

Don't you also need to change /etc/resolv.conf ?

Actually, what you are doing does not seem to me very different
to what Network Profiles (in System Setting=>Network) tries to do.
The only trouble is that it doesn't work properly,
in my experience.


--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

Hmm. well, since most of the time I connect using DHCP, it creates the
correct resolv.conf for me since it populates the file with the right
nameservers. The only case that it does not work right is when I have a
connection at a second work location which I need to use static IP. I
have a saved resolv.conf I just copy over the existing one but I could
probably automate that a bit.

One additional connection is as a VPN client and I have to change routing
rules a bit to allow me to see resources within my home network when I
VPN in. Since I use poptop's linux client, I just create different roles
for /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf as needed and let the PPP up and down
scripts manage those files a bit.

Main thing I wanted was to not have to reboot or use the CARDCTL scheme
thing since I have had mixed results with using the CARDCTL command
sometimes.

--
Michael Perry | do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda
XXXX@XXXXX.COM | http://www.lnxpowered.org

I like what you suggest. That approach makes perfect sense if you don't
reboot. Unfortunately, I have yet to get ACPI working properly for
suspend/hibernate on my JVC Mini-Note so I have to reboot. Not usually a
problem but it would be nice not to have to...

Anyway, thanks!

--
Eric S. Fraga, Department of Chemical Engineering, UCL, London
............*******.*..**.*.*...***.***.*...*...***.*...........

<snippage>


Yeah. The APM/ACPI thing got me on my ThinkPad for quite some time. I
could not suspend the thinkpad reliably using either APM or ACPI. The
Dell laptop works perfectly with APM. I finally got through the ACPI
problems with the thinkpad but it took me a bit. Just as a side note,
have you tried using the latest 2.6 kernel patched with the acpi patches
from http://acpi.sf.net ? These seem to have taken care of my
suspend/hibernate problems on the thinkpad.

--
Michael Perry | do or do not. There is no try. -Master Yoda
XXXX@XXXXX.COM | http://www.lnxpowered.org