In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Scott Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> typed:
> Mike Meyer wrote:
> > In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Scott Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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