PATCH: ifupdown.c, udhcpc, and standalone shell

Eric Spakman E.Spakman at inter.nl.net
Thu Sep 28 06:51:36 UTC 2006


Hello Denis,

>> 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? ;)
>
No, ifupdown has nothing to do with iptables and traffic shaping, it only
initialize the interfaces. If you want to change interface parameters it's
simply a matter of configure it in /etc/network/interfaces and ifdown
<interface>, ifup <interface>.

> 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.
>
Hmm, you change the network topology in the ifupdown configuration...

>
> 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
>
Eric




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