“If you use your laptop in many different locations, you must be tired of having to configure your network manually every time. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is a nice alternative, but what can you do in places where DHCP is not an option. Guessnet is the right tool for that job.”
I have this problem sometimes.
At school, there’re like 20 buildings with 20 different configurations. Fortunately, they start to unify the whole thing.
I’ve always been annoyed by that when moving between home and work and then other friends houses where everything is different.
At least Linux and OSX both have Locations for networks, makes it a heck of a lot easier than Windows.
I never got to check if it was in Beta2 or not, hopefully it will be, it’s a pretty important feature.
BeOS has had the feature for ages as well, I remember R4.5 having support for networking profiles (basically just groups of saved networking settings). I use it all the time for testing new domains where the hosting has been setup, but it hasn’t propagated yet – I just keep a saved profile using the nameservers of the host and switch to it when I need to test.
Is there really that much of a problem with this on Linux at the moment? For the amount of setup this requires it seems it’d be easier to just use the Locations feature in GNOME.
I do like the idea of using the MAC addresses to detect what network you’re on though. I did a test implementation of something very similar to this a while ago and it worked pretty well for the networks I tried.
Maybe if non-DHCP support is implemented in network-manager then this technique can be used to remember and autosetup the network subsequent times the computer is connected.
For “typical” users perhaps some method of autoguessing the subnet and assigning an unused internal IP would complement this. Finding gateways/proxies would be another problem. I guess this is where zeroconf and avahi step in.
IPv6 autoconf (and zeroconf) solve this problem to a large extent. The big question is what to do it you land on a subnet for which you don’t have an address. In those cases link scope addresses help you a lot. Of course you might require a system to actually help (or restrict?) these link level addresses while accessing the internet.