network interface monitoring?

[Kevin Downey]

On Jan 25, 2008 7:41 AM, Yousif Hassan <yousif at alumni.jmu.edu> wrote:
> Hi Pyun YongHyeon,
>
> First, I'd like to say thank you for sending this and trying to resolve
> my (and others') problems with bfe driver.
>
> First the good news - your patch appears to solve nearly all of the
> issues I've discovered and/or reported.  After installing the kernel
> with your patch, under normal circumstances, link up and down events are
> detected automatically by the kernel now, and passed to userland.  I
> tested this with some customd devd scripts to make sure the devd
> notification from if_net.c was ok, and it was.  This is greatly improved
> behavior!
>
> A couple minor nits -
>
> First: The first hunk out of the first file in the patch didn't apply
> cleanly for me but it could be because I'm on a different file revision?
> I'll attach the .rej file.  It's no big deal, because it was trivial to
> adjust it by hand, then I was able to compile.
>
> Second: There's one last remaining issue.  If I set the bfe0_enable
> parameter in rc.conf to "DHCP NOAUTO" (so that it doesn't try to do
> anything on boot, because it can slow the process down while it's
> negotiating an address), then the link state changes get queued up (as
> before) until I manually run ifconfig once.  After that one time,
> everything from that point on is fine (meaning your changes are
> working).  For all I know, this might be unrelated to your driver patch,
> but it was interesting.  Setting the bfe0_enable to "DHCP" meant
> everything worked fine from the start.  Setting it to "UP" also was fine
> in terms of your link state changes working (although in this
> case /etc/rc.d/dhclient script won't work because the interface needs to
> be configured in rc.conf to use DHCP; I must run "/sbin/dhclient bfe0"
> manually in that case).
>
> In all cases, THANK YOU - this is much much much better than before and
> I can live with using bfe0_enable="DHCP" instead of "DHCP NOAUTO".  Feel
> free to ask me for more testing if you want to try and investigate the
> one remaining queue issue.
>

the rc.conf manpage has a few options regarding the function of dhcp including:

     synchronous_dhclient
                 (is currently in beta test.  Set to ``bool'') to start
                 dhclient(8) only in response to interface events and not syn-
                 chronously at startup.  This behavior can be overridden on a
                 per-interface basis by replacing the ``DHCP'' keyword in the
                 ifconfig_<interface> variable with ``SYNCDHCP'' or
                 ``NOSYNCDHCP''.

and

     background_dhclient
                 (bool) Set to ``YES'' to start the DHCP client in background.
                 This can cause trouble with applications depending on a work-
                 ing network, but it will provide a faster startup in many
                 cases.


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