laptop environment detection

[martin f krafft]

[the short story: if you use whereami or laptop-net for detection and
configuration of your environment, please reply privately with pros
and cons of either package. i will send a summary to the list. thanks.]

given that i now vagabond between 11 different networks and that my
numerical memory for IPs, subnet masks, gateways, DNS, lpd, and SMTP
servers is maxed out, I finally want to get a network environment
detection and configuration automatism in place.

I've looked at switchconf, whereami, netenv, guessnet, intuitively,
divine, laptop-net, and laptop-netconf (are there any others).

only two made it to the final rounds: whereami and laptop-net. i've
listed the reasons why the others failed below.

but between whereami and laptop-net, i am undecided. they both seem to
provide similar functionality, laptop-net detects the cable detected
or not -- something whereami can't do. but otherwise they do very
similar stuff.

i am not too fond of the first impression of the configuration
paradigm of laptop-net, but whereami is also not rocking my boat.

i'd try both, but i think it takes time to be able to judge one better
than the other, and that time i don't have.

so i am looking for someone who's looked at those and made a decision,
and for users of either to give me their good and bad impressions.
please try to reply in private mail, i will summarize the pros and
cons when i am ready to make a selection.

here are the ones i ruled out:

- switchconf: interesting and simplistic, but has no automation. it
will probably still remain on my system as it's great for changing
a set of files according to profiles.

- netenv: interactive. i don't want that.

- guessnet: the best approach and philosophy! but i couldn't get it
working, it would always report eth0-none. if i get around to it,
i will file bugs and help find the error.

- intuitively: i could not get it to do dhcp

- divine: seems like a hack, and the author says it's insecure. it's
also meant to be run at boottime. my laptop has an uptime of 112
days ;^>

- laptop-netconf: i don't like the single script philosophy. this
one i didn't look at closely though. it seems basic (== good)

thanks.

--
.''`. martin f. krafft <mad...@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than to fix a system