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Date:      Fri, 1 Sep 1995 11:37:33 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Gritching about XFree86 and serial port naming
Message-ID:  <199509011637.LAA09120@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <9508312015.AA23572@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Aug 31, 95 03:15:21 pm

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> > So does anybody have any brilliant ideas?
> 
> tty[a-?][0-9a-z] for callout
> tty[A-?][0-9A-Z] for callin

Why use tty for callout?  You are killing the potential ranges of tty names.
It's also not quite as immediately obvious that "ttyBZ" and "ttybz" are
paired, and which one plays which role.  "ttybz" and "cuabz" seems more
intuitive to me...

But a naming scheme..  hmm.  It would be nice to see 1024+ ports.

tty[a-o][0-9a-z] would yield 540 ports on the outside.  Given the likelihood
of 8 or 16 port cards, done nicely on letter boundaries, would give 120 or
240 ports.

tty[0-9a-o][0-9a-z] would yield 900 ports on the outside.  8 or 16 port
cards, 200 or 400 ports.

tty[0-9a-oA-Z][0-9a-z] = 1836 ports on the outside.  8 or 16 port, 408 or
816 ports.

That last one seems like a reasonable concept to me....  plenty of elbow
room and the names won't start looking "unusual" until half way through (ok
ok I like "tty00" better than "ttya0", I admit it).

Part of what we should be thinking of, IMHO, is how people manage these
large numbers of ports, and work the naming scheme around that.  As I said,
I would really like to see cards done somehow on letter boundaries such that
I can simply label a breakout box as "tty2*" and if an operator should come
looking for a malfunctioning line, they don't need to come find me to
decipher which box and which line "tty27" is.  The people who are managing
small numbers of serial ports really don't give a damn, but this would be
very helpful to large installations!

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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