From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Sep 1 09:38:06 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id JAA08216 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 1 Sep 1995 09:38:06 -0700 Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.20.4]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id JAA08210 for ; Fri, 1 Sep 1995 09:38:05 -0700 Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id LAA09120; Fri, 1 Sep 1995 11:37:33 -0500 From: Joe Greco Message-Id: <199509011637.LAA09120@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Subject: Re: Gritching about XFree86 and serial port naming To: peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva) Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 11:37:33 -0500 (CDT) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <9508312015.AA23572@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Aug 31, 95 03:15:21 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > > 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