Very Bad Thing: system-config-network horribly broken

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

On Fri, 2004-10-22 at 13:10 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> This does not seem to be much different from 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=90171
> where I was basically told that things are like they should
> be and if every "uninitiated" user trips on the same issues
> then tough.  Or there is some new twist in #136846 which
> I am missing?

From rom reading that bug just now I would say you caught redhat-config-
network in its early stages where it really didn't work. By the time we
got to FC1, however, I used it heavily and it *did* work. Confusing, as
Timothy just said, but it worked.

Basically, this is how it works. You have two devices (ferinstance):
eth0 and wlan0. Note that this discussion ignores the loopback adapter
(lo) since that should *always* be active in all profiles. So you want
eth0 to get DHCP at work but get a static address at home, and you want
wlan0 activated only at school. So you create three profiles: Work,
Home, and School.

Now, since you only need one configuration for wlan0, you can edit that
device's configuration to whatever you want and leave it there. Select
the School profile, set that device to be active (and the others to
inactive), then save changes. Now selecting the School profile and
commanding "service network restart" will get you *only* the wlan0
device in the config you set up.

Since you need *two* configurations for eth0, you need to copy the
device. I would choose to copy once to create eth0Home and leave eth0
for Work (since eth0 is DHCP and fully-automatic, I can also use the
Work profile in other places). However, for the sake of argument I'll
mention that you *could* copy eth0 twice to create eth0Home and eth0Work
and then edit those devices instead.

You now select the Home profile. Edit the eth0Home device to have the
configuration you want, then set *only* that device to be active in that
profile. Save changes.

Again... select the Work profile. Configure eth0 (or eth0Work if you
went that path) as you wish, and make sure eth0 is the only device set
active for that profile. Save changes.

You can now use System Tools -> Network to select a profile and
activate/deactivate devices. "service network restart" will do what you
want according to the profile selected. You can add "netprofile=Work" to
the end of the "kernel" line in your grub.conf to have that profile
activated when booting, making it easy to have three boot options for
your respective profiles.

Piece of cake once you get the hang of it. Not the best UI design I've
ever seen, especially in that the list of devices isn't that clear, you
can't sort devices, the profiles are hidden in a menu when which profile
I'm editing is *CRITICAL* knowledge, etc. Certainly could use lots of
improvement in the UI.

But whatever... it used to work (in FC1 days), and it is now broken. Now
you can configure all the devices you want, but whatever devices you set
to be *active* in one profile are now active in ALL profiles. So you
basically only have one profile. :-(

Make sense? It does look to me to be very different from what your bug
noted (and by the way, I'd be very confident in marking that bug as
closed or currentversion or whatever, since it no longer destroys the
rest of the system).

Cheers,

-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz at simpaticus.com>
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