Debian Laptop on different networks

Monday, August 1st, 2005

I use my Debian GNU/Linux laptop both at home and at work. Sometimes I may take it over to a friend’s network so I can show him some stuff.

Unfortunatelly, being on a bunch of different networks does pose some problems. When I’m at home for instance, I’d like my firewall to block incoming FTP and SSH connections, since there’s no reason to enable them (I use NFS at home). When I’m on the netwerk at work, I’d like FTP and SSH to be enabled. At my friend’s network, I can’t use DHCP but get a static address instead.

Fortunately, there’s the laptop-net Debian package:

laptop-net is a tool for Debian (it may work in other GNU/Linux distributions) that makes moving from one network configuration to another very easy.

Tipically you may want to use it for your laptop, so that you can plug it at home, at the university or to the Matrix, and it will take care of detecting which configuration you need –from a list of preinstalled ones–, and then run scripts, set up the interface, copy files to the root file system, etc.

Rock on! And to think I was almost going to implement some hack thing myself! This’ll save me a lot of time.