Hello all,
In fedora core 1 (and RH9) I had setup my laptop to use different
aliases for the same ethernet device for different wireless lan
profiles/devices.
For example, I have a network profile "Home" which has a device
named "Home" that maps to eth1:1 (eth1 is my builtin wireless card).
For another network profiles "Spot" I have a device named "default"
that maps to eth1:7 (I have similar settings for eth1:2, etc.). I
did this originally in RH9 because having them all use eth1 seemed to
cause the driver to freeze up on occassion when bringing down the interface.
Note that I do not attempt to bring these interfaces up simultaneously.
In Fedora Core 1, eth1 would always be listed in ifconfig, but with no
IP address, and then when I brought one of the aliases up, that would
appear in ifconfig as well.
In Fedora Core 2, I am running into two problems with this setup.
The first, and most infuriating, is that the "new" dhcp client dhclient,
does not appear to play well with the networking layout that Red Hat
is trying to implement. Apparently, when dhclient is run, it executes
/sbin/dhclient-script. dhclient-script will look for
etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-${interface} to find the interface
settings (even though the correct ifcfg file has already been sourced
as part of ifup). Unlike ifup, however, dhclient only looks for $interface
which resolves to the actual device name (eth1 or eth1:1, etc.). In my case,
however, the "device" (from the user perspective) is "Home" and the ifcfg
file is "ifcfg-Home". This pseudonym for the device (which is the name that
ifup and related scripts all know the device as) does not appear to be
transferred to dhclient at all, and thus it fails.
The second issue is that even after hacking dhclient-script to hardcode
the correct ifcfg file in a particular case, aliases are not working.
I get the error "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot assign requested address". I have
concluded that this is *not* an issue with the kernel driver, because
I never had this problem in FC1, and immediately began encountering this
problem after upgrading to the FC2 test (fedora devel) packages, but without
changing my kernel (in other words, this problem came about even in a
kernel which is known to have worked). This does not appear to be a
dhclient-related issue, because a manual ifconfig eth1:1 has the same
effect.
Just for reference, though, I'm running on a Sony Vaio PCG-R505 laptop,
using the builtin wireless card which uses the orinoco_cs driver. When
I use a non-alias device ("eth1") instead, it works fine, but I would
like to get it working with aliases again.
Also, I might as well unload a couple pet-peeves with this networking
stuff:
- I don't understand why the network control cannot use symlinks
when you are switching profiles, rather than store copies
of the device settings in 2 permanent locations
(.../networking/devices and .../networking/profiles) and an
additional place for the active profile (.../network-scripts).
- I would like to be able to allow non-root users to change the
current network profile without needing the root password (in
general, it would be nice if the auth config stuff could allow
for sudo-like access rather than requiring the root password).
If no one has any input, I guess I'll submit these as bugs.
--
prothonotar at tarnation.dyndns.org
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots."
- Jonathan Nolan, /Memento Mori/
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