Re: [gentoo-dev] openrc: oldnet vs newnet

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:16:08 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:

> The drawback I see for newnet is that it does not allow the user to
> control each interface separately, so if you want to cycle one
> interface for some reason, this is not doable in that setup.  I agree
> this is a serious drawback.  Oldnet addresses this by having a
> separate script for each interface.

That's not entirely true. If you use DHCP indeed, 'cycling' a single
interface is as simple as:

$ ifconfig eth0 down
[...]
$ ifconfig eth0 up

And there's no real requirement for more action here -- dhcpcd running
in the background is going to automatically request IP address for that
interface.

> On my laptop, I have net.lo in the boot runlevel,
> and I start wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd in the default runlevel.  In
> that setup, there is no need for any net.wlan* interface scriptss,
> because dhcpcd and wpa_supplicant manage everything.

And in that particular configuration oldnet is overly complex. You
could simple use network to set up lo0.

> Can pppd be set up to run standalone like wpa_supplicant can and
> manage the ppp portion of the interface?  Do the dhcp clients
> recognize ppp interfaces?  Afaik, there is no way for me to test this
> since I haven't had a ppp interface for years, and I do not know of a
> way to simulate one.

Not really. pppd is assigned to a single connection, and manages
a single interface. Unless you're going to use some kind of wrapper.

> If all of this can work, why not come up with a new version of oldnet
> that uses this type of setup?

The largest disadvantage in oldnet that I see is its' complexity. It
just wraps over everything, making the actual configuration more
complex than writing the actual commands.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny