On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Janina Sajka wrote:
My experience of reordered interfaces is primarily with my laptop which has both a wired and wireless device. In my home location, things stay pretty stable, even though I switch between these two several times a week depending where in my premises I use my laptop. I set the appropriate static ip via directives in my dhcpd server under /etc/dhcpd.conf based on mac address. This works reliably, even though there are some 30 other wap servers in my vicinity as long as I remember to specify essid with iwconfig. I have never succeeded adding essid to any /etc config file in the past. I'll try again. The problem comes when I'm on the road trolling for a dhcp address via whatever local service might be available.I generally preferred wired, when I can get it, but often use wired at night in the hotel and wireless during the day around the conference table. I have frequently seen eth0 assigned to wireless. In fact, I've seen all kinds of crazy designations for wireless device made up of a few alpha chars and about 5 or 6 digits. In other words, I've learned from experience, to look at the output of iwconfig (without arguments) if I'm not getting an address off the first try with dhclient. Oh, and yes, I still find dhclient most reliable.
I've found the latest NetworkManager updates are getting to be very robust for grabbing wired or wireless connections "out of the air". There are still a few quirks and a few missing features, but mostly, I can walk into a new environment and immediately connect wired or wireless via DHCP. If the ESSID is hidden, I may need to specify the connection and if it's encrypted, I need to enter the key, but after that, it Just Works the vast majority of the time.
You do need the interfaces to stay in one place, though...
Just my two cents American. Thanks for the new scripts. Janina
-- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
