From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Sep 28 17:33:33 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from smtp01.primenet.com (smtp01.primenet.com [206.165.6.131]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5051637B423 for ; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:33:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp01.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id RAA02684; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:32:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr05.primenet.com(206.165.6.205) via SMTP by smtp01.primenet.com, id smtpdAAARlaWff; Thu Sep 28 17:32:31 2000 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr05.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA05430; Thu, 28 Sep 2000 17:33:10 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200009290033.RAA05430@usr05.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Ideas about network interfaces. To: des@ofug.org (Dag-Erling Smorgrav) Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 00:33:10 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), ragnar@sysabend.org (Jamie Bowden), dot@dotat.at (Tony Finch), res03db2@gte.net (Robert Clark), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Dag-Erling Smorgrav" at Sep 28, 2000 03:41:06 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > If nothing else, "en" based aliases could be providedm and if > > people wanted to name them explicitly instead, and have to > > hack up the interface names in all their scripts, they could > > still do that (if they were insane). > > Everybody who does not agree with you, or is satisfied with a system > you dislike, is insane? Anyone who avoids a small amount of work for themselves at the expense of a huge amount of work for others is "insane". Why do people want to hack up scripts that they don't have to hack, except for the sake of some valueless namespace differentiation between drivers they could care less about, when what they are interested in is network connectivity? Why do people want to have to configure things that their software could configure for them? What is the point here, to ensure job security for people who, without this needless obfuscation, would have to learn how to ask "would you like fries with that?"? It makes no sense to make things unnecessarily complicated, with no other justification than "that's how it has always beeen, so that's how it should always be". Consider a laptop, where the connectivity changes between the undocked and docked states, but there is no need for the network configuration to change. Yet the user is still required to hack scripts. This is as bad as Windows, with its "hardware profiles"; at least Windows gives you the option of selecting between the available profiles at boot time; FreeBSD doesn't even give you that (yet). Unifying the network interface namespace is a step in the right direction. I would be happy to not have to hack up scripts to get network conectivity, the next time I install FreeBSD, or duplicate an existing setup on a new machine. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message