Our Networking Story

[Dale Amon]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 09:39:40AM -0500, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> > Lots of us only use a GUI as a place to let us keep 40
> > xterm's available...
> 
> Could you detail what process you are exactly using to do this
> reliably?  Are you using bonds/vlans/bridging?

On my current job, I am using a laptop that goes out to run
test gear on a remote test stand. I turn off wifi; there is
no wire on eth0 and I use a USB dongle for an eth1. I have
a simple subnet in RFC 1918 space that I bring up with an 
ifup on site. I've found over the years that network manager
tries really hard to bring up an external connection and 
it owns eth0 from boot time, but not the USB that I plug in
later.

As to other configurations, on servers I just remove network
manager and everything to do with it because its too high
a risk. It is hard to nail down specific scenarios because
(up until two years ago) I worked as a gypsy consultant, 
hopping from one customer to another and fixing things. Mostly
though, you set up an interfaces file, work out any of the
funky issues... and then it may not change for years. If
something goes wrong I might have to remotely go in and
reset or tweak something.

Hard to get more specific. It all muddles together over
the years but I have dealt with most things. Not a lot of
bonding, although I did work with a 'big iron' Intel 
modular server with a modular and programmable block
of ethers that gave myself and two other engineers a merry 
chase until we finally beat it into submission... but that
was not a Linux problem per se, although we were running
Linux on the modules.

Just take this as a general plea to keep things simple and
always in ASCII config files so that some poor SOB who
has to fix something in the middle of the night over an 
a possibly intercontinental connection via ssh or IP to RS232
gateway while fiddling with a remote power control unit
to power cycle it...