vlans and cloning

[Sam Leffler]

Dmitry Pryanishnikov wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> On Sun, 9 Jul 2006, Sam Leffler wrote:
>> clone operation?  This would change the user api but otherwise I can see
>> no reason for continuing to support the old mechanism where you do:
>>
>> ifconfig vlan create
>> ifconfig vlan0 vlan 1 vlandev em0
>>
>> Anyone _against_ nuking the above?
> 
>  Do you mean that you're going to nuke
> 
> ifconfig vlan create
> 
> but not
> 
> ifconfig vlan0 create

No, you can still specify the name of the cloned device.

> 
> ? As I understand the flow of /etc/rc processing, support of the
> 
> ifconfig vlan0 create
> ifconfig vlan0 vlan 1 vlandev em0
> 
> sequence is required for now. Also, I thing it's perfectly correct to have
> 
> cloned_interfaces="vlan30"
> 
> while NOT having 'ifconfig_vlan30' assignment - system administrator
> could just reserve a spare interface w/o assigning it's parameters. So I
> think
> that possibility of the specific device cloning w/o arguments, e.g.,
> 
> ifconfig vlan30 create
> 
> should be preserved.

Clearly one would need to fix rc scripts.  The question is should the
old behaviour be preserved; it provides no functionality--i.e. a cloned
device is unusable until you set the tag+parent and you cannot set the
tag or parent on an existing cloned device (once setup).  So the only
benefit to the ability to create a usable vlan device in 2 steps is to
preserve existing practice.  Removing the 2 step procedure would allow
code to be removed and (IMO) clarify how a vlan is crafted.  In the
future there will be cloned devices that cannot/will-not be specified
with a 2-step procedure so having vlans work this way will violate POLA.

	Sam