Re: [Fwd: Re: here i come !]

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

> <quote who="Bruce Robert Pocock">
> 
> > There was talk of this in a local LUG recently, about detecting the
> > active/available network using things like arpwatch. "I can't see a
> > network on your wireless card now, but I see your friendly office
> > fileserver on your ethernet card..." (Inspired (?) by Win2k "popup
> > network switch detection" things...)
> 
> I have played with mii-tool to detect a network and launch dhcp requests.
> That's pretty cool, but unfortunately, it doesn't work with the ethernet
> card on my iBook. :-)

I wrote something similar to use on my redhat laptop because I couldn't 
get the debian-y tools (like divine) to work properly.  It uses a modified 
version of one of donald becker's tools to trigger a recheck when the 
network cable is plugged in again, and then uses arp requests to detect on 
which of the (pre-defined) known networks you are.

If it finds a network, it changes net configuration accordingly, as well 
as some other files (which you can easily expand on), like fstab, hosts, 
sources.list, and so on.  It also executes some commands you define (like, 
automatically mount a few shares you use).  I even thought of making it do 
an rsync of my folder with to-be-backed-up files, so that I always have a 
full backup of everything at home and at work.

Works beautifully and for laptop users in the GnomeOS something like this 
is a must-have feature.  I can't tell you how easy it is now for me to 
just take my laptop home, plug it in and keep on working ;)

So something like this needs to go in.  Only problem with my version of it 
is that it lacks front-end stuff and it's probably not that easy to make a 
good GUI for it if you want the features I have with it (since what you 
actually do is create a few of these system files for each configuration).

Thomas

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