How work around TCP/IP looongstanding bug (or Location Manager?)
How work around TCP/IP looongstanding bug (or Location Manager?)
- Subject: How work around TCP/IP looongstanding bug (or Location Manager?)
- From: "David B. Gustavson" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 13:45:31 -0700
When you change location with Location Manager and this changes to a
different TCP/IP configuration, there's an ages-old bug that TCP/IP
doesn't actually load the Hosts file corresponding to the new
configuration until you restart or manually re-find the right file
using TCP/IP's "Select Hosts File" button.
This is a common source of delayed errors, because the Hosts file is
where you have to keep the definitions of your smtp server and nntp
server aliases (if you don't want to edit them explicitly in your
email software everytime you change location). (Thanks to Steve
Dorner, of Eudora fame, for telling me how one does this.)
E.g., a typical Hosts file contains:
smtp4me.org CNAME smtp.myISPname.com ; Varies for home, work, and travel ISPs
nntp4me.org CNAME news.myISPname.net
I think I heard once that Location Manager might be able to launch a
script upon a change of location. If so, one could write a script
that copies the right stuff into the Hosts file immediately, and
avoid the subsequent mail-sending or news-reading errors. But I
haven't seen any documentation that gives a clue how to get Location
Manager to trigger a script.
One work around would be to always change locations using a script to
control the process, to drive Location Manager, but that seems a bit
of a kludge since it requires using a nonstandard method rather than
fixing the bug in the standard method. OK for my use, but hard to
document on others' machines that I set up.
A better way would be if there is a Location Manager Module that can
run a script, that script could be used to clean up after the TCP/IP
configuration change (and possibly to drive the change). Is there
such a module?