Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: only the loopback interface should provide net

[Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, 2012-02-07 at 11:33 -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 04:46:58PM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> > 1) Separate net.lo service for stuff that doesn't have to have an 
> > external connection at all.
>  
>  This can be easily done. I'll just make net.lo* not provide net.
> 
> > 2) A default net (or net*) service that is is composed of all non-net.lo 
> > services, with a default any-one-of-them policy.
> > Two reasons for this:
> > 
> > 2a) It'll "just work" in the simple case.
> > 
> > 2b) It's the easiest to automatically preconfigure without getting into 
> > lots of "detect all the networks and magically figure out whether they're 
> > lan-only or inet" hairballs.
> 
> As soon as you add a second interface, this default "net" service
> breaks. That is why I think we should add an "internet" service that
> consists of interfaces the user says provide a connection to the
> internet. Then we could make our services that need real
> internet connections need that service instead of net.

As I discussed in #gentoo-dev, it breaks if some of your interfaces are
lan-only. That might be not uncommon in the server room, but for the
typical gentoo user with a desktop or laptop, all interfaces are
generally expected to allow internet connections, and if more than one
is up (e.g. both eth0 and wlan0), the kernel will do the intelligent
thing and choose the best one to route through.

-Alexandre.