[Tfug] laptop network configuration

[Brian Masur]

>From: John Gruenenfelder <johng at as.arizona.edu>
>Reply-To: Tucson Free Unix Group <tfug at tfug.org>
>To: Tucson Free UNIX Group <tfug at tfug.org>
>Subject: [Tfug] laptop network configuration
>Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2006 16:07:19 -0700
>
>Hey all,
>
>I've finally gotten myself a new laptop to replace my (poorly) aging Vaio.
>It's a Dell E1405.  As laptops and Linux go, it is perhaps a little *too* 
>new,
>but I've managed to get all the hardware working.
>
>My question is actually laptop agnostic.  I'm using Debian and I want to 
>have
>the network set up to automatically probe its surroundings.  I briefly 
>tried
>laptop-net, but it didn't really seem to fit what I needed.
>
>At present, ifplugd, guessnet, and wpa_supplicant seem to be the correct
>choices.  However, I am lost as to how to implent this.  Documentation is
>scattered and not very good.  And Debian seems to have integrated 
>everything
>into the ifupdown infrastructure.  This is a good idea, but the 
>documentation
>is still lacking (I gather this was a recent change).
>
>So, at home I have:
>   eth0 -> DHCP
>   eth2 -> DHCP, SSID="bebop" + WEP
>
>at school it's:
>   eth0 -> DHCP
>   eth2 -> DHCP, SSID="UMASS" (or any other publicly available AP)
>
>This seems to me to be a rather simple setup.  Anybody else have their
>laptop's network config automated?
>
>Thanks in advance.

First of all, congrats on the new laptop.

So you want to make it smart enough to change settings according to the 
SSIDs available?  Well, I know in Gentoo it's supposed to be enough to have 
a config section for each SSID in /etc/conf.d/wireless (I think that's where 
it was) or /etc/conf.d/net and the normal wpa_supplicant config file.  
Anyway, I never did get it to work, I think because I had to use ndiswrapper 
because the broadcom driver wasn't available back then.

I did it the dirty way, cronned a bash script to run iwlist -scan to see 
what was available, then run another bash script depending on which SSID was 
available, I had one for each SSID.  Forgive me if I misspelled one of the 
above commands, it's been a while since I pitched that laptop.