netplug [was Re: Automatically bringing ethernet interfaces up when the cableis connected]

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 20:16, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 11:10, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > Well, as HAL isn't mature at all the only thing I presently do is to
> > monitor the MII registers, if available, as in mii-diag by Donald
> > Becker. Obviously this only works for ethernet.
> 
> FWIW, the MII interface is only supported by a patchy number of cards,
> while netlink is more generically supported (though it's still not
> 100%).
> 

Ok, I didn't know that. I've looked at both netplug and ifplugd and it
seemed a bit complicated, so I've opted for the more simple MII stuff.

> > I'm sure there are better ways to do this though, but my point was
> > really that it makes good sense to put all hardware dependent stuff,
> > like network link detection, in a hardware abstraction layer in a way
> > that is OS-independent way such that the desktop environments can use it
> > without resorting to #ifdef-hell.
> 
> Need some help?
> 

That would be great! 

It should be straightforward to replace the code I've got today. I'll
need to update a few files in CVS [1], so why don't I send you a mail
when that's done? HAL is discussed on the xdg-list, by the way.

Thanks,
David

[1] : currently I'm transitioning the probing/monitoring code from a
      separate daemon to the hal daemon to simplify things