[ltp] fyi: booting without network

[Andrew McMillan]

On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 21:25, Meidinger,Christopher wrote:
>  As a Windows Network Admin i've taken the plunge, killed windows, formatted
> my hard drive, and installed Linux. So i hope this question is not idiotic.
> Nonetheless, my solution for this under windows has always been 2 Hardware
> Profiles, and the Network Card is simply not installed in one of them.
> Seemed to be the cleanest to me. 
> 
> Does anyone have an idea whether this would be possible in Linux?

Doing it that way is certainly possible, but there are a number of
solutions that work to detect your location and configure things
appropriately.  As well as 'whereami', which I developed, there are
others such as 'guessnet' and 'divine'.  Depending on your network type
even the 'hotplug' setup may be sufficient.

What you can use may depend on your distribution and what is available
within it.

whereami (my package) is a perl script which uses a modular set of tests
to ascertain your network location (and possibly hardware
configuration).  It then adjusts various things to reconfigure your
laptop to suit.  There is a some configuration involved, of course, but
it usually takes me a minute or two to set up for a new location the
first time, and every time after that when I arive I just plug in the
network cable, open the lid and I'm off...

All of these packages are available in Debian - I'm not sure of their
status in other distros but AFAIK nobody is using whereami other than
with Debian.  It might need a little tweaking to work elsewhere, but I
am happy to help anyone who would like to use it in a different
environment.

Regards,
					Andrew.
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