Re: RHEL 4 Wireless?

[Stephen Gardner <stephen-rhel uk org>]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Brian Long wrote:

> I was wondering if RHEL 4 includes something similar to ifplugd
> (http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/ifplugd/) to allow for multiple
> interfaces to be online (wired and wireless) and also set the wireless
> metric higher (similar to http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/ifmetric/)

Brian,
        Thanks for the references to  ifplugd  and  ifmetric  which are 
useful to know about.

> I also wish the NetworkManager utility allowed for scripts to be run
> before and after DHCP renewal.

        Looking at NetworkManager I note that it calls  /sbin/dhclient 
and you therefore might be able to create 
/etc/dhclient-{enter,exit}-hooks  scripts [something tells me you may 
well already know this feel free to ignore the rest]. Have a look at 
dhclient-script(8) which is called by dhclient when DHCP changes state. It 
checks for and calls  /etc/dhclient-{enter,exit}-hooks  with a  $reason 
environment variable (PREINIT, RENEW, RELEASE etc). A case statement 
checking  $reason  in those scripts should let you do DHCP state-by-state 
functions. I started by simply having dhclient-{enter,exit}-hooks log when 
they are called and the environment. It's hardly very integrated with 
NetworkManager but it doesn't step outside of the RHEL4 release supplied 
code too much either.

        Other than that perhaps an enhancement request into bugzilla for 
either RHEL or possibly Fedora Core (I doubt it'd make FC4 but FC5 will be 
along at some point and could likely form the basis for RHEL5) asking for 
the inclusion of  ifplugd  and  ifmetric. Maybe a request for features 
into the NetworkManager mailing list with some suggestions as well. Given 
the company you work for I suspect any recommendations will be taken 
seriously by the list and Dan Williams (the NetworkManager lead).

        A trivial final note is that NetworkManager in RHEL4 initial 
release was build in October 2004 and (unscientifically) has an expanded 
source code size of 3.3MB, the FC4-test1 version of NetworkManager is 
4.8MB so it's definitely under heavy active development.

Regards,
	Stephen

References:
dhclient-script(8) [ HOOKS section ]   man page
NetworkManager-0.3.1-3.src.rpm  package
NetworkManager-0.4-1.cvs20050307.3.0.src.rpm  package
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list
http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/