Redhat rant/review

[Gerald Combs]

Is the address 169.254.x.x?  If so that's a "link-local" address.  The
169.254.0.0/16 block has been set aside for hosts that need to assign
themselves an address when no other means are available, e.g. they don't
have a static address, or they've been configured to use DHCP and the DHCP
server isn't responding.

Link-local addressing are an integral part of the Zero Configuration
Networking (http://www.zeroconf.org/) standards making their way through
the IETF. In other words, this isn't the last time you'll see a 169.254/16
address.

Sounds like Fedora completely ignored whatever network settings you gave
it and assumed it needed to use Zeroconf.

BTW, 169.254/16 and other special blocks are documented in RFC 3330:

    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3330.txt

On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Brian Densmore wrote:

> Well I finally got around to looking at RH again.
> I installed RH 9 on my laptop. It installed and runs
> fine, if a bit slow. It did some strange things
> though. It has created a strange eth0 configuration,
> which I haven't found yet. Somewhere in the boot process
> it adds and address 169.x.0.0 even though I've never told it
> to use any address like that. It also didn't initialize
> my network correctly. I had to open up a text editor and modify 
> the configuration files. It didn't detect my soundcard.
> Granted, only SuSE has ever detected and run my IBM laptop
> soundcard. Also it doesn't change the environment variables
> when I su to root. I can't open up filemanager as super user.
> I basically can't administer my system unless I actually log in
> as root, instead of just su for the function I need. It
> didn't create the right ownership on some temp files and
> I had to open a shell and chown some files to make some things
> work. Granted I didn't install the gnome desktop, so maybe 
> they pay more attention to making the gnome desktop work
> than the kde desktop. Next I will reinstall Redhat and 
> try the gnome desktop again. Further rants to come, I'm sure. ;)
> 
> Now Fedora is an unstable release right?
> 
> Brian
> 
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