Re: [gentoo-dev] Proposal: networking startup script rewrite

[William Hubbs <w.hubbs@comcast.net>]

Hi Michael and all,

I am going to try to give some input on this also.


On Mon, Oct 13, 2003 at 02:56:00PM -0400, Michael J. Cohen wrote:
> After wrestling with our current net implementation to get bridged interfaces 
> and vlans working, which ended in me just setting up things in local.start, I 
> figured a rewrite of our network scripts is in order.  
> 
> I have made a primitive version of the rewrite available here:
> http://325i.org/proposed-net-replacement
> 
> It is useless in its current state and only provided as an example.
> 
> The reason for this rewrite is twofold: ease of configuration and ease of 
> maintenance.
> 
> Here are a few of my ideas for the evolution of this currently primitive 
> rewrite:
> 
> * all networking related configuration should take place in /etc/conf.d/net, 
> thus eliminating /etc/conf.d/iptables and such

I don't agree that iptables should be a part of this; I think of setting up a firewall as a separate, but related task.  I do, however, like the idea of one script, and one config file that controls bring up and down all of the network interfaces.
> * bringing interfaces up and down should be handled by one script that 
> recognizes all possible up and down configurations of an interface, for 
> example, 802.1[d,q] (bridge,vlan), netfilter, dhcp, bootp..

I agree here.  it would be nice to be able to have a script or utility that would handle all of this.  Don't shoot me for this, lol, but I thought that debian's ifupdown utility was pretty slick.  It had a configuration file that described all of the interfaces, the default gateway  and whether or not interfaces should be brought up on bootup, and it was called by a single script that brought all of the interfaces up or down.

> * configuration of iptables, ipsec, routing, etc should be handled by the up/
> down script calling the appropriate /etc/init.d scripts with the appropriate 
> arguments.  these scripts would have to parse /etc/conf.d/net or rely on some 
> of the functions in /etc/init.d/net to parse it if the user should decide to 
> start/restart/reload a script individually

I think these should stay separate.  I guess my thinking here is that all systems that need to be on a network don't necessarily need these functions, so why make them part of the net script?

> If anyone has any input, please feel free to speak your mind.
> 
> I would love to see gentoo become the easiest distro to configure network 
> interfaces for *any* and *all* possible configurations, and I feel that this 
> is the first step to achieve that goal.

Let me know what you think.

William


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