[Nottingham] Network settings and different wifi locations

[Christopher Joice]

My setup uses DHCP to always assign me the same IP when on my home
network, it was fairly easy to associate the MAC with an IP in the
config of my router. As such I use networkmanager / nm-applet to handle
all my network connecting, it always uses DHCP but if DHCP always gives
192.168.1.3 to the MAC of your wifi card, there is little difference
between that and a "static" IP.
nm-applet has a KDE version, knetworkmanager ? Anyway, it can integrate
with g/k wallet and store wep / wpa etc. keys so remembers wifi
connections you have already made. It also scans for any available
connections and defaults to wired if you plug that in.

Very handy software, however it can only manager one connection at a
time so no cance of connection sharing, although they do have this on a
to do list.

Might not be what you want, but it's one way to do it. Also, so long as
the MAC is the same you will always get that IP, even if you run
windows / another os on that system, and no other system will get that
ip.

Hope this helps!

On Sat, 2007-12-22 at 19:56 +0000, David Aldred wrote:
> I'm just wondering if there's any better way to do this before I start 
> scripting...
> 
> When I'm at home, I use my home wifi with my laptop; for various reasons I use 
> static IP addresses within the network, and have specific static addresses 
> assigned as gateway, web proxy and DNS server. 
> 
> If I'm somewhere where a wireless connection is available, I'm obviously going 
> to need a different wireless setup (WEP keys etc), and kwifimanage will 
> handle that nicely.   However, I also need to use DHCP and obtain gateway/DNS 
> information from the local wireless network - so I need to 'clean out' the 
> static information.
> 
> I have a feeling that *somewhere* in Linux and/or KDE I've seen something 
> which seemed to do this - set up different IP and Wifi configurations as 
> simply as selecting a pre-set configuration and OK'ing it.   In fact, I 
> thought it was a built-in part of kwifimanager, but it's not - I can set up 
> encryption etc from there, but not (at least directly: it's possible to get a 
> script run on selecting a kwifimanager profile) the IP address configuration.
> 
> It's not the most onerous of tasks to write a script which will take an 
> argument and set up both wireless and IP configurations according to which 
> argument is passed to it (and asking for the WEP key where, as in many pubs, 
> a WEP key is required to connect) - but does anyone know whether someone's 
> already done it (probably better and prettier than I would!)?
> 
> (Using a console and running a single script as root seems to me marginally  
> easier than using kwifimanager to call the same script !).
> 
Thanks,
Christopher Joice
-
http://chrisjoice.co.uk