Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Casey Harkins <charkins AT upl.cs.wisc.edu>]

Lots of interesting ideas, I have been considering modifying the network
subsystem to support "plugin" scripts which could potentially handle some
of these issues.

These plugins would be installed by the spells they support (ifplugd, 
hotplug, etc). Plugins would provide:

  - plugin short/long description
  - list of network options that are configurable
  - short/long descriptions for each network option
  - a validator function (to validate a nework options)
  - optionally overrides default do_device_up(), do_device_down(),
    on_up(), ...

The existing network options would actually be handled by a plugin as 
well, installed from net-tools. netconf would then have an option on each 
device to choose the plugin to handle that device. That choice will then 
effect the remaining options netconf displays and configures for that 
device.

Some additional functions would also be added (which can be overridden) to
allow these plugins finer control over the network system.

I think this sort of thing would be capable of doing some of the ideas you 
mentioned. I'm going to have to sit down and give it some more thought.


On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Mads Laursen wrote:
> I've messed around a bit with ifplugd, and it is quite nice, except
> that I seem to recall that it requires the nic-driver to be compiled
> in, since ifdown rmmods it. It's been a while, so I can't recall if

I mentioned this in my previous message on my thread. The work-around is 
to add the module to /etc/modules and configure the network device (via 
netconf) to be static. Turning off UP_ON_BOOT is also prevents a small 
race condition that could cause ifup to be run twice on boot for an active 
device (once by the network init script, once by ifplugd when it detects 
link beat).

There's more info in the initial spell submit bug:
  http://bugs.sourcemage.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4595



-casey