netconfig just mauled my startup time!

bl0tt0 · 11-29-2005, 04:13 AM

I just ran netconfig on my Slackware 10.2 system so that I wouldn't have to manually runt through setting my computer's name every time I connected to the internet. I am running Slackware on a laptop that generally connects to the internet via wifi, and so no every startup into Slackware involves a minute-long wait while dhcpcd tried to discover that mt computer isn't plugged into an ethernet cable. I compiled and installed both libdaemon and ifplugd and wrote dhcpcd scripts into the ifplugd.action file in place of the ifup/ifdown commands, hoping that this would fix the problem, but nothing doing there.

My guess is that ifplugd isn't getting run at startup, though I configured it so that it put startup scripts into rc.d. If not this, I'm not sure where exactly the problem lies, but I really wouldn't mind just fixing the startup script so that dhcpcd either isn't run at startup, or is run in the background later. Can someone give me a clue where netconfig writes this script?

GlowGlow · 11-29-2005, 06:45 AM

Code:

$ grep "/sbin/dhcpcd" /etc/rc.d/*
/etc/rc.d/rc.0:  /sbin/dhcpcd -k 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null
/etc/rc.d/rc.6:  /sbin/dhcpcd -k 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:        echo "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:  /sbin/dhcpcd -d -t 60 ${DHCP_OPTIONS} ${1}" | $LOGGER
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:        /sbin/dhcpcd -d -t 60 ${DHCP_OPTIONS} ${1}
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:      echo "/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:  /sbin/dhcpcd -k -d ${1}" | $LOGGER
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1:      /sbin/dhcpcd -k -d ${1} || /sbin/ifconfig ${1} down

Now, that wasn't hard, was it?

You can see immediately see the timeout (that is set to 60 seconds).

Alien Bob · 11-29-2005, 07:43 AM

bl0tt0,

You could try out my adaptations of rc.inet1 and rc.wireless at http://www.slackware.com/~alien/rc_scripts/
Especially look at the "ifcfg"directory there and read the README.
I created that stuff for the exact situation you are describing - I have a wireless laptop too and I carry it around a lot.

Note that these scripts are still experimental and although they work for me and several others, they might bust your system :-) Please give me any feedback you can think of if you decide to use them.

Eric

GlowGlow · 11-29-2005, 07:59 AM

Nice work Eric. For the moment the feature I miss most is MAC address-based configuration, rather than using the interface name for configuration. This is one of the reasons for which I still prefer to replace the networking scripts with ifupdown et al.

bl0tt0 · 11-29-2005, 06:40 PM

That works almost perfectly for me! The only problem I've noticed is that I still have to run "dhcpcd ath0 &" after startup and logging in. I notice that the hotplug devices get detected after the inet startup scripts, and I think that may be a problem. I use madwifi to load an atheros wireless chip, and as I recall, it is loaded by the hotplug system at boot. I'm not for sure on that, as I've only just started delving into linux on this machine. It's not that huge a deal, but it is an annoyance nonetheless. All in all, the new scripts definitely fixed the long wait at boot time.

Many thanks for the help guys!

EDIT: I finally fixed this, though I'm not quite sure how.