hostname, current iface info, mac address

[stefanocrosta]

Bonjour!

I really like this for fork - much cleaner code organization, to start with.

I'm be interested in having access (read, write when meaningful) to a few more network related info:

1. hostname
2. mac address
3. address, mask, gateway, dns, etc. when in DHCP (auto) mode

do you think they fit this tool (it would not strictly be reading the interfaces file), is there any plan to add them, or would you accept pull requests if we work on that part?

Reason for asking is that if the answers are no, I'd probably rather put these functionalities in a separate module rather than living with a fork that will never merge back..

Thanks!

[nMustaki]

Hi ! I'm glad you like the project :-) 1) Hostname is available directly through python, I don't think it's needed to add a function: ```python import socket print(socket.gethostname()) ``` 2) Mac address is more tricky, especially if the computer has several interfaces, but there's the very nice netaddr library 3) debinterface does exactly what, reading and writing the /etc/network/interfaces file, but it needs way more examples, documentation and tests, if you want to help me do that you're very welcome !

[stefanocrosta]

Thanks for your quick answer - and welcome :) !

little feedback:

1. hostname is easy to read, but difficult to set, since that involves writing to /etc/hostname for persistency, executing hostname HOSTNAME for immediate availability, and optionally editing /etc/hosts to be sure that the name is resolvable
2. yes the idea would be to combine the information directly into the debinterface adapters. The most compact way i found would be this
3. because debinterface reads from the file, when an interface is on DHCP (auto) it comes back with no IP address. The netiface library instead provides a portable way to always gather the ip address of an interface.
   The following screenshot might help explain what I mean:

Thus my question: do you feel debinterface should stick to the current approach, strictly providing the info in the interfaces file; and in that case I can use debinterface to edit but instead use netifaces for retrieve live information;
or does it make sense to combine netifaces functionalities into debinterface, so that, for instance, MAC address and DHCP Ip address can be obtained directly?

Both solutions are fine of course, and you know more than me what's more suited to the library!

Hope this is clearer :-)
thanks again

[nMustaki]

Hi,
I took some time to draw a "policy", sorry for the delay.

As the codebase stands right now, integrating features from netifaces would break too many things (it would try to write them to file for instance). Also, debinterface's role is clearly limited to read/write on the interfaces file (with an exception, dnsmasq), and I think it's important to keep it that way.

That said, I understand your use case and I think we should start a new project dedicated to handling the networking side of a debian-like system as a whole, by integrating "low-level" libraries. It may already exist, I don't know yet.

What do you think ?

[stefanocrosta]

Hello! Sorry I was a bit late myself in answering...

After reading your answer I fully agree: it makes sense to keep debinterfaces strictly limited to what it is (read/write interfaces + dnsmasq) and write a new "glue" project that uses other low level libraries to provide a full picture.

I don't think such a project exists - when looking I only found read/only libraries such as netiface and debinterfaces for read/write support. I'll be away on a bit but I'll start giving this some thoughts and maybe we pick this up again together end of january - but feel free to get started if you have great ideas already :-)

Thanks!