broadcast adress assignement in GUI

[Gaël Varoquaux]

    Hi,

	sorry if this isn't the right place to discuss this, but I think
my issue is related to the gnome-system-tools package which refers to
this mailing list.

    My remark is the following : consider a network with the following
settings in the "Network settings" GUI :

    address 10.10.156.13
    netmask 255.255.0.0
    gateway 10.10.156.1

	Now I do not know that much about networks, but I think this
means that I can speak to 10.10.159.14 without going through the gateway.

    Now suppose their is a windows server on 10.10.159.14 . A lot of
communication with the windows server is done through broadcast
messages. However if I set through the GUI these settings, my broadcast
will be set to 10.10.156.255 (am I wrong ?). Therefore I won't see the
windows server, and I won't appear on its "workgroup" list, even if my
samba server is properly configure. This is not a theoretical scenario,
I ran into this problem at work today. I edited the
/etc/network/interfaces and solved it, but I am not satisfied by this
solution : it is not easy to find out the problem and a newbie will
simply not solve it without help.

    I suggest that either there is a broadcast field added to the GUI,
or, perhaps better, the the GUI tries to guess the broadcast address
with the netmask (I don't know if this is possible).

    I am interested in your comments on this. If you think this is a
good idea, this should go upstream to the developers of the program, as
this can be a rather insolvable issue for the newbie who doesn't even
know that there might be a broadcast address to play with.

    Regards,

	Gaël