Alexander, I appreciate your trying to help, but I am just not that interested in pursuing this. I had a need to make some changes for a VPN at school (routing etc...) prior to the network coming up; pre-up has been disabled for whatever reason, so I found a one-off workaround to use. It's a hassle to maintain however, so I have simply abandoned using the VPN - it's simply not worth it for the single service I needed it for, I can do without. I had thought the lack of "pre-up" was a simple oversight that would be quickly fixed once noticed (which is why I opened the bug). I am frankly astonished, however, that it was simply dropped with no good reason and no mention in the docs/change files. I don't know who "upstream" is (I know what the word means - but I personally do not know who it refers to in this context) so I cannot fathom their reasoning for abandoning it. It seems like an arbitrary, or at worst, biased decision to get rid of a perfectly good, working and elegant system that many people were using. I'd be interested in hearing what reasons "upstream" has for getting rid of pre-up, but I am frankly not hopeful that said reasons will be forthcoming. I am not interested in helping to create a bunch of one-off, special case hacks to replace a perfectly good system that was axed due to a dumb decision. It's sad to see such lock-down approaches being taken in a Linux distro. I had always believed that Linux was a free and open system, in the truest senses of the words, where users were allowed to do whatever they choose with the system. It seems to me a restrictive step back to take something that was once easy to do and deliberately make it harder. You can count me out of this process. Thanks for the attempt. On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:00 PM, Alexander Sack