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From: Pete French <petefrench@ticketswitch.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:19:59 +0000
Subject: Re: Desired behaviour of "ifconfig -alias"
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> For a set of IPs in the same subnet on the same interface, wouldn't the 
> primary IP be the one with the proper netmask, and all IPs with netmasks 
> of /32 be secondary?  In that situation, wouldn't deleting the primary IP 
> cause connection issues for the rest of the IPs?

Indeed. I too am not convinced by the 'there is no such thing as a
primary IP address' thing either - because it's trivial to observe
that if you add several addresses to an interface and make outgoing
connections then one of those (the one with the correct netmask) is
always the one used as the source address. Which looks suspiciously like
a primary IP address to me - or at least one which is being treated
slightly differently to all the others on that interface anyway.

-pcf.