[ On Wednesday, August 13, 2003 at 13:42:00 (-0400), Michael Richardson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /sbin/ifup 
>
>   It gets harder as the contents of /etc/ifconfig.* get more complicated.
>   It is also harder to educate junior admins about this.

no excuses for the ignorant!  ;-)

>   We have routers with 5+ interfaces - we wind up adding/deleting aliases
> on these interfaces for various reasons about once a week. If we do it with
> "ifconfig", often we do not guarantee that it will occur again after a
> reboot.

Ah, OK, that's what I was wondering about.

Just to re-iterate what you've already no doubt said in some fashion
back when you first proposed your script:

So, what you (and no doubt many other users) really need is some way to
selectively do certain operations on one interface without necessarily
affecting all the other interfaces.  I.e. to do some of the things one
might do with a more sophisticated router configuration interface.

One such operation is simply to turn down down and un-configure a
specific interface and then restart it from scratch using the exact same
configuration data and procedures that would be used during a system
reboot.  The idea being one would edit the /etc/ifconfig.whatever file
and then re-configure that interface alone.

Another such operation might be to add or remove aliases, either by
address or by interface, but again using the exact same configuration
data and procedures that would be used during a system reboot.

Does that sum things up correctly?


I think the first feature is relatively easy to implement directly in
the rc.d script just by adding some custom parameters to it.  I think
doing it directly in /etc/rc.d/network would be better than having a
separate /sbin/if* script(s).

The second is a little more complicated to implement, especially if
specify your aliases in the /etc/ifconfig.* files as is the modern way.
Do you think this kind of functionality is worthwhile to have in
addition to the basic ability to turn down and re-configure an interface
from scratch?

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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