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Location Profiles For Unix Laptops?

Posted by Cliff on from the at-work-at-home-and-at-your-next-LAN-party! dept.

Cyron Green asks: "I travel quite a bit with my laptop (it keeps me company). I hate having to change my NIC settings everytime I stop somewhere or I go from work to home. Is there any type of Location Managment software out there for Linux or FreeBSD?"

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Re:cardctl scheme by William+Aoki · · Score: 4

    PCMCIA schemes are set up in /etc/pcmcia. Your network settings live in /etc/pcmcia/network.opts and are used by the script /etc/pcmcia/network.

    RedHat replaces /etc/pcmcia/network with a script that uses RedHat's network configuration files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. This allows you to use the GUI configuration tools to set up your network but prevents you from using schemes to handle your network configuration. On my RedHat laptop, I went diving in the pcmcia-cs source tree to find the 'normal' /etc/pcmcia/network so I could use schemes.

    That said, I normally leave my laptop set to obtain network configuration information from DHCP. The DHCP servers on networks where I have a static IP have been told to reserve it for my laptop (well, technically, for my laptop's NIC), and when visiting other networks I don't have to futz around finding an IP. Whenever the computer is away from its home network, it uses MobileIP to bring up a tunnel back to its home agent. It looks more or less the same to other hosts regardless of its location, and I can suspend the laptop, drive to another location, and plug in to a completely diffirent network without disturbing my ssh sessions.