ifcfg-* files vanishing

[Steve Hill]

On Thu, 24 May 2007, Bill Nottingham wrote:

>> Is there a recommended way to keep persistent configuration information
>> for a device (e.g. ESSID, WEP key, etc.)?
>
> If I may ask, why is the device disappearing - is it hotpluggable?

It is a 802.11 device with a kill-switch.  If you boot the system with the 
kill-switch set to disable the device then the wlan0 NIC never appears. 
(So to all intents and purposes it's hot-pluggable).

I would have thought the same would apply to any hot-pluggable device - if 
I unplugged a CardBus or USB device and then plugged it back in I 
wouldn't expect my network configuration to have been erased either.

> Maybe. This isn't new behavior, it's been that way in all Fedora releases.

The same never happened on my old notebook which had a cardbus 802.11 card 
- unplugging the card didn't result in the configuration being wiped.  I 
haven't tried a previous distribution on the machine I'm currently testing 
on since it's a brand new machine though.

How is network configuration intended to be persistently stored?  This is 
more important for 802.11 devices than wired devices since there are 
things like the ESSID to configure before it can be used, so the system 
can never pick useful defaults.  If I unplug an 802.11 device then I would 
expect it to reconnect to the network with all the same settings when I 
plug it back in.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence