[lug] 10-minute demos

[Alan Robertson]

luke p wrote:
> 
> I'd be very interested in quick and dirty was to networking. Setup, config,
> ect..
> 
> >>>>>"C" == Chris Riddoch <socket at peakpeak.com> writes:
> >
> >     C> Hi, everyone.  Does anyone have ideas for 10-minute demos
> >     C> they'd like to give or hear about at the upcoming meeting?  The
> >     C> demo is just a brief presentation of some tool or application
> >     C> under Linux, to give people a hint about what's new in the
> >     C> Linux world, perhaps a quick lesson on how to use something, or
> >     C> even just showing off something Linux can do.  It's short and
> >     C> simple.
> >
> >     C> What do you want to know?
> >
> >I would love to learn more about:
> >  - distribution programs (like Debian's dselect, apt-get, etc.)
> >  - network configuration (specifically, how to network two linux


[snip]

Here's a thought aboutcommon  network configuration problems.

I wrote a really cool script that will tell you if your basic network
configuration is correct and working.  It does automatically what everyone
does by hand.  You invoke it just by saying "checknet" with no arguments.

Explaining how it works would be a good way of showing how to go about
troubleshooting your own network.

It looks at the route information for your routers.  It looks at your DNS
configuration, and then it tries to ping all of these addresses. [It uses
fping so it's really fast]

If it can ping them, then it does a traceroute to remember how it got there
last.  When it can't get to a particular endpoint, it tries to ping all the
addresses that were in the route the last time it worked.  This last step is
done in a different way when you do it by hand, but something equivalent is
often done.

I could demo that sometime if there's interest...

	-- Alan Robertson
	   alanr at unix.sh