From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202 Description of problem: I wishit was possible to have a daemon looking for an available DHCP server. If one is found, it would automatically start an ethernet connection to this DHCP server. It's (AFAIK) the way Windows handles local network connection. Currently, you can set up a network connection using DHCP and tell RedHat to start it upon start. The problem is that if your cable wasn't plugged (or the DHCP server not up) upon start, the connection won't be established and you'll have to start it manually later. I think the reconnection should be automatic (as an option maybe). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: N.A. Additional info:
reassigning to initscripts
FWIW, I think this would be better worded as "we should have a daemon looking for a cable being plugged in" i.e. ethernet link state watcher which could then run some events.
There actually are a couple of these daemons now.
Actually, that is not what windows does. If the link is down, it will wait until link becomes available. We can do the same thing with /sbin/hotplug, it is just not implemented right now. If the link is up, but no DHCP server is available it will time out and set a 'link-local' address in the 169.254/16 range. This is part of zeroconf and it would be nice if Red Hat Linux (or should I say Fedora) could do the same thing. 'Linux Magazine' issue August 2003 (not yet available online) has a nice article on page 16 about this. Basically what happens is that windows tries to use the first address in the link-local range, and if it clashes takes the next one up until it gets a free address. Other parts of ZEROCONF are Name Resolution and Service Discovery, the problem with these is that there are different parties that currently do not agree on how to do it. For more info check out http://zeroconf.sourceforge.net/
This is handled currently by NetworkManager; further complication in initscripts won't be added.