SubscribeSwedish National Day: Deep thoughts...
Tuesday, 06 June 2006From time to time, even though it seems to occur more frequently these days, I think about the persistence of things. How development is continuously accelerating in the modern world. To me this is like a double edged sword, it's both comforting and unsettling. Comforting that we as humans continuously improve and develop our methods and technologies. Unsettling because I know much of the development is in directions that I don't approve of: more intricate and capable weapons and methods of surveillance. Yet somehow we manage to survive and thrive in our lives.
Laptop Network Configuration in Debian/Ubuntu
Tuesday, 06 June 2006I have three network cards in my laptop. Two built-in and one PCMCIA card. I'm currently investigating how I can migrate from using the slow and tedious gnome-network & C:o tools to the more integrated Debian/Ubuntu tools ifupdown, guessnet, ifplugd and waproamd instead. As usual Debian has a fine and clever way of handling all this with their /etc/network/interface file. To learn more about this fine management interface I'm reading the well written book The Debian System by Martin F. Krafft. I highly recommend it to others wanting to learn the essentials of their Debian (based) system.
What I wanted to do is quite simple actually: The built-in wired interface, named eth0, should on link-up default to a specific IP address if ARP reveals a certain MAC on the network. If plugged in to an unknown net eth0 should go up with DHCP. If eth0 is not up then the built-in wlan card, eth1, should be tried with two different ESSID's, work and home, in that order. If none of the ESSID's could be found any open wlan and DHCP should be the tried. The last, eth2, the PCMCIA card is only used for the lab net and always have the same IP address if plugged inm completely ignoring link status.
When I've implemented the above I'll post the result here.