[Cialug] Fedora 10 Networking

[David Champion]

Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 10:12 AM, David Champion <dave at dchamp.net> wrote:
>   
>> Jeffrey Ollie wrote:
>>     
>>> The old-style network configuration is handled by the "initscripts"
>>> package.  Don't remove that though - you'll have more problems that
>>> just networking :).
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> [WARNING: slightly off-topic ranting and fist shaking ahead...]
>> I was reading the blog about the upcoming Mandriva 2009.1 (Spring)
>> release... one change that's coming (not sure if it will be in this
>> version or the 2010 release) is migrating off the old initscripts to the
>> newer stuff RH is using, because initscripts is (are?) not going to be
>> maintained. I'm dreading that change...
>>
>> One of the main reasons I started using Mandriva (Mandrake at the time)
>> was because they did a good job of un-RedHatting-up the broken stuff, in
>> particular networking scripts in RH that had the same bug from like 2.x,
>> I think they finally fixed it in 6.2, about 4 years later. That... and
>> the lack of supported packages in RH, and switching to newer / better
>> versions of stuff much quicker.
>>     
>
> Boy, it sure seems like NetworkManager has gotten a bad rep that won't
> go away.  Sure early versions had bugs (what doesn't?) and people were
> expecting it to be the all-singing all-dancing Microsoft-ish network
> configuration/management tool from day 1.  The 0.7 versions available
> in Fedora 10+ (maybe 9 has it as an update too) will do 99.9% of what
> I need on desktop and/or laptop.  In theory it's usable on servers but
> I'd rather save the memory and RHEL/CentOS has an older version.  I'm
> not an Ubuntu user so I don't know how well integrated it is there or
> how current they are keeping.
>
>   
Right... but the bug I'm talking about was what should have been a show 
stopper, and took like 4 years for them to fix, even when the other RH 
derived versions had fixed it, and I understand a patch was sent back to 
RH, but they refused and / or neglected to use it. Every time you 
changed a static IP address using the tool, you had to manually edit the 
/etc/sysconfing/network-script/ifcfg-eth(x) file and change the 
netmask... I think it always wrote it as 255.255.255.255 no matter what 
you specified in the tool.

Add to that using old versions of software, sticking with bug-laden 
stuff like wu-ftpd for years after everyone else gave up on it, and 
configuring mysql to run slowly (I've done my own benchmarks to compare 
doing the same query on the same hardware... RH was 3 times slower than 
Mandriva's version of mysql)...

Yeah, I know I'm probably holding a grudge against RH for way too 
long... kind of like why I didn't like Suse for a long time because an 
early version I ran used to spit out random German language error 
messages at you even if you selected English as your language... and my 
understanding of German is mostly what I learned watching Hogan's Heroes 
as a kid... :)

I'm not saying Mandriva is bug-free... I have a current issue where my 
wireless connection doesn't come up on reboot. I have a work-around of 
typing "iwconfig wlan0 essid my_essid", even though it already shows 
that essid... makes the connection come up. That's some goofy stuff.

The network manager in Ubuntu is pretty decent... I'm not an expert on 
it, but it seems to be OK.

-dc