Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2006 18:53:11 -0400 From: Mike Meyer <mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers.102a7e@mired.org> To: Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, Ceri Davies <ceri@submonkey.net> Subject: Re: Using any network interface whatsoever Message-ID: <17464.16087.217524.843667@bhuda.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <44383346.2030207@samsco.org> References: <C05CAC06.C0BD%ceri@submonkey.net> <20060407225742.GA21619@odin.ac.hmc.edu> <20060407230247.GH16344@submonkey.net> <4437C9F6.5000008@samsco.org> <17463.65076.117616.563302@bhuda.mired.org> <443811EF.2020509@samsco.org> <17464.8074.937742.701480@bhuda.mired.org> <44383346.2030207@samsco.org>
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In <44383346.2030207@samsco.org>, Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> typed: > Mike Meyer wrote: > > In <443811EF.2020509@samsco.org>, Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org> typed: > > Please trim the text you are repling to. > Please, I'm tired of arbitrary email etiquette. If you think etiquette is arbitrary, you're sadly mistaken. > > But where do you put the label on an ethernet interface? > It sounds like your message is, "don't be like Linux." No, the message is "don't use solutions we know have serious problems". Having devices names that change when you don't make any changes to the device can cause serious problems. Linux does that for lots of things. FreeBSD does it for some things. > Fine, what do you want instead? How does having 2 em devices in my > system, named em0 and em1, tell me by name which one is connected to > which LAN? It doesn't, any more than having disk0 and disk1 instead of ad0 and da0 tell you which disk has the root file system on it. It's not clear that that particular problem can be solved at the device name layer. It's not clear it should be. For disks, the device name should uniquely identify the drive in the system. Nothing short of changing the drives bus address should change that. Volume labels identify the data on the drive, which is what the user cares about. Letting the users work with what they care about should be the goal. My question about labels for ethernet devices wasn't meant to be rhetorical. Ethernet device names on Unix are pretty much worthless. They tell you basically nothing about which device you've got. On FreeBSD, different card types have different names, which is better than nothing - but that's about all it's better than. We need something akin to labels for ethernet devices. The LAN it's plugged into is the equivalent of the data on the disk - but there's no equivalent for the label. What do I want for that? I identify ethernet boards by which slot on the back of the system I plug the cable into. Currently, I have to map that to board types to and which board is plugged into which slot to know which name to use. I want a name that tells me which slot I plug a cable in to plug it into that interface. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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