autonet 0.5.0 review
Downloadautonet.py is a small application which looks up existing network configuration files, probes the network with arping in order to det
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autonet.py is a small application which looks up existing network configuration files, probes the network with arping in order to determine if it can connect and ideally set up a working internet connection and routing.
If no internet connection is available, autonet.py will parse each configuration file, extract different network setups and probe if the network environment works with this configuration.
The probing is done with arping. A bogus IP 0.0.0.0 is used in order to get the network interface up. Then autonet.py tries to arping the gateway.
If the gateway responds the configuration is considered good. At this point there is no routing, so only hosts within the subnet defined in the configuration is used.
If none of the gateways in the configuration works, the probe gets more 'brutal' by just setting up the network interface according to the configuration file, and and ping the gateway. Again, no routes yet.
If a configuration is considered working (gateway is pingable), the route is set as described in the configuration file. An internet connection should be established then.
This is also checked by pinging k.root-servers.org (as default, override with --testhost), use an IP address here, as DNS is not handled by autonet (yet?).
There is a special feature in autonet.py for owners of some models of Asus notebooks. The package contains a module which uses two LEDs of the laptop to show activity.
While searching and probing, the blue LED is flashing, if a working configuration is found the orange LED flickers for a second. Also this will only work if you have the asus module in your kernel, and it has *not* widely been tested. Have a look at Asus.py for details.
Some common vars can be edited in autonet.py, such as locations of required programs and some common settings (of which timeout does not even work yet) but in most cases supplying reasonable commandline arguments should be sufficient.
As Gentoo has slightly different settings, there are two scripts for Gentoo users, to make integration into the Gentoo init system easier.
Requirements:
python, at least 2.2 (tested with 2.2 and 2.3)
the following shell commands:
ping
arping
ifconfig
route
recommended: fping, which makes the second stage faster
What's New in This Release:
renamed to 0.5.0 after extensive testing, this should be a stable and reliable core
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