Booting with different network options?

green sun · Guru Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 325 Location: Wista, MA

Hi all:
I've got a Dell Inspiron 8100 that I have Gentoo 1.4_rc1 running beautifully on. However, since I move the laptop between home & work, I was wondering a few things:

1. Ideally I have two net cards, the onboard EEPro & an old Aero wireless card. Assuming both are working fine, can I set up boot options in grub to have two menu options, one to boot a work configuration (using the EEPro), and a home to boot with the Aero? I've assumed that one would be Eth0 & the other Eth1, so setting up /etc/conf.d/net is easy.

2. Is there a way to have a work config & a home config boot option for just the EEPro? At home & use DHCP & at work I have a fixed IP. Right now & just edit /etc/conf.d/net & switch, but since I'm using this laptop more and more, this becomes a pain...

Any help is greatly appreciated!
thanks
~gs

38282 · n00b Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 21 Location: Copenhagen

Have you looked at app-admin/quickswitch?

/Paul

green sun · Guru Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 325 Location: Wista, MA

thanks 38282.. this looks useful, but not exactly what I'm looking for (tho I will be using it in the meanwhile...)

Im a long time OpenBSD user, so saying this brings bile to the back of my throat, but Im looking for something like MS's Hardware Profiles (NB: these do *not* work in the way I have described I would like GRUB to work in my first post...). I want to be able to have a few lines in Grub that allow me to select different network card configurations. Am I not able to do this by passing kernel parameters (I have no idea, and Im very n00b to Linux kernel)?

Thanks for the help
~gs

Proteus · Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2002 4:32 pm Post subject:

I think what you want to do is easily accomplished with the help of the rc command in Gentoo.
All you would have to do is make a second .net script as if you would set up multiple network-cards during installation (see the documentation for help on that) and then set up two different runlevels, one for home-use, one for work-use.
Then you could easily switch the used net-cards and how their ip addresses are assigned by just typing "rc the-runlevel-you-created".

Hope this helps - correct me if I got you wrong or this solution is mere crap ;-)

_________________
Greetings,
Proteus

BackSeat · Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2002 9:14 pm Post subject:

Taking Proteus' suggestion one stage further, you should take a look at the runlevels document from Gentoo (there's a link to doco on the Gentoo homepage). Then configure a 'spare' runlevel as you want your home network to be, and append the runlevel number to the kernel line in grub's menu.lst.

Exactly what you put there depends on your configuration, but something like:

aja · Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2002 12:57 am Post subject:

You guys might want to look at:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=20192&highlight=

Which seems distantly related.

green sun · Guru Joined: 04 Nov 2002 Posts: 325 Location: Wista, MA

Guys:
Thanks for the advice.. I'll review the docs today & give this a shot tonight...

thanks!