[arch-dev-public] New wireless and network scripts.

[James]

On 4/2/07, Thomas Bächler <thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
> error handling: if you do
> something wrong, there will be no "parse error" message, but just weird
> things happening. And - of course - if a third party has rights to
> change config files, they could exploit that easily.

Depends on the error, if you miss a 'then' on an if, yeah, you'll get
an error, but other things, it's not an error, just a different result
:) But I know what you mean.

Third party and config files is not bash specific. By nature,
/etc/network.d is root writable only, although making it root only
readable may be a good idea too to hide network keys.

> That is great. IMO, the disadvantage here is that we need several
> configuration files for them .... Do you
> know a cool bash-parsable configuration file layout where we could put
> them into one file?

Arrays is the only thing I can think of,

PROFILE='multi'
KEY[0]=something
CONNECTION[0]='somehing else'

Or...

CONNECTION="multi"
HOME_CONNECTION="wireless"
HOME_KEY="sdasdsa"
WORK_CONNECTION="ethernet"
WORK_IP="dsaomdsadas"
NETWORKS=(HOME WORK)

Or.......... my dream setup, ala bsd

home="connection wireless key 12346 interface ipw0"
main="connection multi childs home,work "

but it's very nasty to parse -- not impossible though, I have done it
in experiments -- and involves wrapping all of the iwconfig and
ifconfig options to acheive an equivalent functionality level.
wrapping that many is icky.

> If you say that the network scripts are nicely implemented, then I
> believe you and will indeed look at them more carefully tonight (I was
> just too tired yesterday, so I added my thoughts and didn't read the
> latest version of the scripts).
>

I hope they're nicely implemented, but i'm hardly one to judge my own
code :) It does have it's faults.

> That would be worth looking into.

Further thoughts, and implementation idea:
I thought about an ini style config. That could work *really* well.
I don't want to drop the bash side of these either, it'll be too long
before we see something new, and these work well, I havn't picked up
any new bugs for a few days now... not to say they don't exist.

So... a Csomething based parser of ini files. Would be totally awesome.
[main]
connection=wireless
key=something
security=super

Orr.... another file....
------
[main]
connection=multi
profiles=home something else
[home]
connection=wireless
[something]
connection=ethernet
-------
.... and you get the idea.

If I could run: netini main.connection and get the value from the ini
file, I'll rewrite these netscripts in a night and they will work far
better, and the codebase will be far better.

I *could* write such a thing in python pretty quickly but I can see
people not liking that. Which is fair enough.

If this config file form is agreeable... i could write an interim
python one and implement that until either I mess around with C or
someone else writes one... ini shouldn't be difficult given it's
ubiquity, so there' probably existing parsers. otherwise... any other
format suggestions are welcome.

Thoughts?

James
-- 
iphitus // Arch Developer // kernel26beyond // iphitus.loudas.com