net.hotplug and ifup (Mandrake 9.0)

[zephod <zephod@chello.be>]

Dear all,

I have a setup with 5 network cards and I only start 2 of them at boot time 
(ON_BOOT=yes/no in the corresponding 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth?). When I upgraded form Mandrake 8.2 
to 9.0 the version of hotplug changed from 2002_01_14 to 2002_04_01. One of 
the differences is the following lines in net.agent (line 30):

    # Don't do anything if the network is stopped
    if [ ! -f /var/lock/subsys/network ]; then
        exit 0
    fi

With the removal of this piece of code all network interfaces are brought up 
by hotplug (using ifup) at boot time. Although I was tempted to reinsert 
these lines as a quick hack, I dove into the .etc directory to find some 
answers. After some digging I encountered some lines (47 in /sbin/ifup):

if [ -n "$IN_HOTPLUG" -a "${HOTPLUG}" = "no" -o "${HOTPLUG}" = "NO" ]
then
    exit 0
fi

So I tried to set a "HOTPLUG=NO" in the interfaces I don't need at boot time. 
Offcourse now these interfaces are impossible to setup with e.g. ifup eth1. 
This was not the desired effect. The solution was to add "HOTPLUG=no" (notice 
the difference) to the corresponding 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth? and add a line to 
/etc/hotplug/hotplpug.functions (line 21):

export IN_HOTPLUG=yes

which produces the result I need.

I would like to see some comments about this. As far as I can see there are no 
other scripts (installed on my system) which use the IN_HOTPLUG variable. I 
suspect that it was intended to be used in this way. Can anyone confirm this? 
I checked out the latest version of hotplug (without installing it though) to 
see if the IN_HOTPLUG variable was set somewhere but couldn't find it.


thanks,

Z




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