[WHEREAMI] Re: Setting up whereami

[Andrew McMillan]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 22:34 +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> Hi Andrew :-)
> 
> On Tuesday 25 October 2005 20:22, you wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 13:19 +0200, Holger Levsen wrote:
> > > - nice to have softwhere:
> > > 	- whereami on the video & presentation laptops
> > A fan!  :-)
> 
> well, dunno (yet), I'm only using it since saturday and still have to finish 
> my setup. (Which I only work on after moving around which doesnt happen every 
> day atm:) 
> 
> One question: how do I turn down interfaces ? I'm one wireless here, when I go 
> home on wires, it will be detected correctly, but the wireless interface will 
> still be up...

When they are annoying I "ifconfig ath0 down" manually in my
whereami.conf.  Actually, in my case I "rmmod ath_pci", but that's
really a hangover from the days when the atheros driver was fairly flaky
and that was necessary for it to work next time!

I use this:

///////////////// whereami.conf excerpt /////////////////////
# This only happens if we are not at a WLAN
!wlan     ifconfig ath0 down
!wlan     rmmod ath_pci ath_hal
!wlan     resolvconf -d ath0

# This only happens if we are not at a LAN
!lan     ifconfig eth0 down
!lan     resolvconf -d eth0
///////////////// whereami.conf excerpt /////////////////////

which does the trick, assuming your wireless is ath0, and you have some
global "I'm at a wireless location" location detected called 'wlan'.  In
my case 'wlan' will be true if (a) I do not have a wired connection and
(b) there is at least one AP broadcasting it's ESSID within range.


The "resolvconf -d ..." lines are needed to remove any cruft in the
resolver that was associated with those interfaces.

I guess that this could be handled a little nicer - perhaps whereami
could pass on the list of interfaces that it found, and a command added
to allow someone to say "deconfigure all the non-loopback interfaces".

Meanwhile...


> But I already spread whereami to another gentoo user, who was a little 
> unhappy about the missing install script. (He used the unstable debian 
> package "manually", instead of going the alien/rpm way :)

So are you using it under Gentoo?  We have a couple of Gentoo fanboys at
work, and I've tried to persuade them to tell me what would be needed to
be able to 'emerge whereami' or otherwise make it work smoothly in
Gentoo, but I haven't been able to get them off their lazy butts :-)

All patches gratefully welcomed...


> enjoy your summer! :)

Yes, just starting to get nice and warm again...  Sitting here on a
sunny evening gazing out at the ocean :-)

See you later,
					Andrew.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew @ Catalyst .Net .NZ  Ltd,  PO Box 11-053, Manners St,  Wellington
WEB: http://catalyst.net.nz/            PHYS: Level 2, 150-154 Willis St
DDI: +64(4)803-2201      MOB: +64(272)DEBIAN      OFFICE: +64(4)499-2267
    Woodward's Law:
        A theory is better than its explanation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.catalyst.net.nz/pipermail/whereami-discuss/attachments/20051026/c0868b62/attachment.pgp