Improvements to ethernet detection

Richard ('rerwin' in the Puppy Forum) posted that his ethernet is not working at first bootup:

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=1054811#1054811

This is a difficult situation, as I cannot reproduce it, nor do other users of Easy have this problem, not that I know of anyway. So, I have nothing much to go on, however, attempting to improve the code.

I have done some work on these:

/usr/local/pup_event/pup_event_frontend_d
/usr/local/pup_event/frontend_timeout60
/usr/local/pup_event/netchg
/usr/sbin/delayedrun

The first one is a C program, pup_event_frontend_d.c, in the 'pup_tools' PET. It is a daemon, that is started when X starts. One of the things it does is detect ethernet carrier up and down, which corresponds to the modem turning on or off, or the ethernet cable being unplugged or plugged. It will also detect a USB wifi dongle being unplugged or plugged.

When it detects one of these events, one of the responses is to call the 'netchg' script.

There was a possibility that an event could be missed in pup_event_frontend_d, so I have worked on the code to fix that.

In the forum it was suggested that running "/etc/init.d/rc.networkmanager restart" after bootup will cause NetworkManager to reassess the ethernet and obtain an IP address from the modem dhcp server. So I have put this into the 'netchg' script.

For debugging purposes, text printed from 'netchg' will appear in /tmp/xerrs.log, so it can be seen if it is getting called and what it is doing.

I have also modified this script:

/etc/rc.d/rc.network_eth_nm

Previously, it brought up the ethernet interfaces. However, now it does nothing, just exits. Back in the early days when I started using NetworkManager, it seemed that I had to explicitly bring these interfaces up. However, NetworkManager is supposed to do that automatically, so now allowing it to, and working so far for me.

These changes will of course be in the next release, and we will see if Richard's problem is resolved, or getting closer to being resolved. 

Tags: easy