From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 11 6:10:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.gmx.net (pop.gmx.net [194.221.183.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0A38B37B423 for ; Wed, 11 Apr 2001 06:10:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from michaelnottebrock@gmx.net) Received: (qmail 17931 invoked by uid 0); 11 Apr 2001 13:10:41 -0000 Received: from pd950a1c0.dip.t-dialin.net (HELO lofizwei) (217.80.161.192) by mail.gmx.net (mp001-rz3) with SMTP; 11 Apr 2001 13:10:41 -0000 Message-ID: <009701c0c288$cfc4dce0$0508a8c0@lofi.dyndns.org> From: "Michael Nottebrock" To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" , , References: <000e01c0c24a$9c9edfc0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> Subject: Re: Naming ethernet NICs Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2001 15:10:40 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" To: ; Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 7:45 AM Subject: RE: Naming ethernet NICs > >-----Original Message----- > >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Michael O'Henly > > > >So if NICs are named on the basis of their type/driver, doesn't > >that mean a > >lot of reconfiguring is needed if you should happen to replace a card with > >something different? > > > > Let me point out that with regular PC hardware, you can't replace a NIC with > a different type without taking the server offline. Once you do that, all > of the benefits of "transparent reconfiguration" are basically lost. > > In any case, even if you do it differently and make everything "eth0, eth1, > etc. and so on, then how do you determine what physical card in the system > goes with what port? > > To give you an example, recently I built a router on a 486 with 5 separate > nics in them. Every NIC in the router is the same, (SMC8013) and > thus I had ed0, ed1, ed2, etc. On bootup, I still had to test each port to > determine which physical card went to what ed. One disadvantage of the BSD-type naming convention is that one does end up putting rl0's, ed0's and the like into config-files or batches, which have to be changed if the hardware changes, for example a '/usr/local/sbin/dhcpd dc0' in /etc/rc.local or a 'set device PPPoE:rl0' in /etc/ppp/ppp.conf, or (the most annoying) if you happen to have lots of 'via ' statements in your ipfw ruleset. Greetings, Michael Nottebrock To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message