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Date:      Mon, 24 May 2004 10:59:10 -0400
From:      "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
To:        Alex Semenyaka <flist@jabberwock.rinet.ru>
Cc:        Peter Pentchev <roam@ringlet.net>
Subject:   Re: [RFC] ifconfig: match by link-level address 
Message-ID:  <20040524145910.E776920F68@whizzo.transsys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 24 May 2004 18:27:43 %2B0400." <20040524142743.GA5564@qqmore.rinet.ru> 
References:  <20040520162919.GA1971@straylight.m.ringlet.net> <20040520171833.GA22494@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> <20040521133530.GA1403@qqmore.rinet.ru> <20040523233737.219F720FC5@whizzo.transsys.com> <20040524034049.GA1022@qqmore.rinet.ru> <20040524135147.2BF7320F6C@whizzo.transsys.com> <20040524142743.GA5564@qqmore.rinet.ru> 

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> Well actually you should discuss the necessity of the changes in ifconfig with
> the author of the original posting :) What I proposed was just middle way
> between what he proposed and what I did. I mean if somebody is changing
> ifconfig anyway that way would be easier to implement. However personally
> I did the job without any modification of ifconfig at all.

Sorry if I dropped into the middle of the thread, and replied to the 
wrong message.

> > I'm not sure how much easier "automatic" renaming might be.  You still
> > need some ability to specify policy on what interfaces are renamed
> > (e.g., only 100Base-T ethernet but not 802.11 wireless).
> 
> What I am trying to solve is the situation when you have a box with (say) 4
> etherexpresses and first on them is dead. Then old fxp1 becomes fxp0,
> old fxp2 becomes fxp1 and so on. And now you cannot remotely connect to that
> box abd find out what is going on, that's it.
> 
> So I want automatic renaming during the boot, but I want it controlled:
> "this card will have the name intel0, that on - intel1", and it should 
> leave untouched cards without explicit entry in the renaming config. It
> is the way I did it. Do you see any disadvanatges there?

Sure, I understand what you're after.

> About the media type... well, I believe that if I will pick the MAC-address
> of the card and new name I know what that card is, right? I do ifconfig,
> choose cards I want to rename, and create renaming config. Why do I need to
> specify also media type? Is it possible that my wireless adaptor will have
> the same MAC-adress as my Inter Etherexpress? I believe not.

I mentioned this example because I have more than one PCMCIA 802.11 NIC
cards, and I may not care which one happens to be inserted at any given
time, since they tend to rotate between a couple of different laptop
computers.  For my situation, since there's only one of these things
that can be installed, I don't need to worry about what MAC address it
uses.  In fact, I have my DHCP server set up to hand out very different 
types of addresses based on what card is inserted (either a globally
routed address, or an address that gets NAT'ed on the way out).  So in
this case, the per MAC address policy is done elsewhere.

I think this is a very useful capability; I think that I've also seen
stuff move around when reconfiguring the BIOS, or certainly when moving
cards around.  This capability seems like a more general solution than
buying multiple vendor's cards..

louie



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