[arch-general] netcfg

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

Hello all,

I'm a new user of ArchLinux, so far installed on two
machines (more wil follow). Coming from first Suse and
then Fedora it was a big change, but I learned a lot in
the process and have the nice feeling to be back in
control of my machines (they also lost some weight). 

The one remaining problem is with netcfg 2.2.1.
On my laptop I have the drivers e1000 and ipw2200
loaded in rc.conf, providing the devices eth0 and
eth1 in fixed order.

For the first I use:

CONNECTION="ethernet-iproute"
DESCRIPTION="Local ethernet - zita1 router"
INTERFACE="eth0"
IP="static"
ADDR="192.168.2.241"
GATEWAY="192.168.2.240"

and this works nicely. The only strange thing is that
it fails when the interface is not connected. I've 
never seen this on the systems I used before, and 
since you can disconnect the network cable and put
it back without any ill effect on the interface 
configuration I'd really expect it to be configured
as well if the physical connection is not present.

For the wireless connection all the examples use
dhcp but I need a fixed address. Combining the
examples I arrived at:

CONNECTION="wireless"
DESCRIPTION="Wireless connection at Basilicanova"
INTERFACE="eth1"
SECURITY="wep"
ESSID="lovettanet"
KEY="........"
IP="static"
ADDR=192.168.1.241
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"

which fails with:

lovetta up
SIOCADDRT: No such process
Adding gateway failed.

After some experimentation I found that
the following works:

CONNECTION="wireless"
DESCRIPTION="Wireless connection at Basilicanova"
INTERFACE="eth1"
SECURITY="wep"
ESSID="lovettanet"
KEY="........"
IP="static"
POST_UP="ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.241; route add default gw 192.168.1.1"

But it doesn't feel right. Am I missing something
obvious ?

Many thanks,

-- 
FA