PATCH: ifupdown.c, udhcpc, and standalone shell

Denis Vlasenko vda.linux at googlemail.com
Thu Sep 28 00:45:05 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 27 September 2006 21:51, Eric Spakman wrote:
> Hi Giuseppe,
> 
> >>> What about adding a build option to decide what dhcp client to use
> >>> and the options/arguments needed to execute it?
> >>>
> >> That doesn't work for distros like LEAF and probably openwrt where
> >> the user has the option to select which dhcp client to use by installing
> >> a specific package.
> >>
> >
> > Well.. they shouldn't :)
> >
> Why not? It works great ;-)
> 
> > Just an idea: each dhcp client in those distros could ship a script to
> > translate from a generic dhcp client interface used by ifup, to its own
> > specific (which looks a bit overkill, but i'm definitely against probing
> > for programs in the filesystem..)
> >
> The whole idea of ifupdown is to provide a common interface to network
> utilities. What you describe is an interface to this interface.
> Not only the various dhcp clients are listed in ifupdown, but also ppp,
> wvdial, bootpc, ifconfig, iproute, ....

I guess it fails horribly in the areas of setting routes
when various links go up and down in random order, or
(god forbid) if you also need to reconfigure iptables firewall,
traffic shaping, etc? ;)

It should be done the other way around. pppd, udhcpcd etc should
send a "hey, the network topology is changed!" signal to big fat
"reconfigure network now" script, which do all of the above.

How you start and control pppd/udhcpcd/etc is entirely different matter
(and the solution is: the same as you start and control e.g. Apache)

> It's the purpose of ifupdown to greatly simplify networking on for example
> embedded router distros and provide a common interface with a simple
> config file and a plugin framework. Adding extra scripts would in my
> opinion make things unecessary complicated. The current ifupdown works,
> why would you cripple it?

Please keep me CCed, want to hear a solution (if it will be found).
--
vda



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