Using any network interface whatsoever

[Mike Meyer]

In <4437C9F6.5000008 at samsco.org>, Scott Long <scottl at samsco.org> typed:
> Well, the real question is why we force the details of driver names onto 
> users.  Network and storage drivers are especially guilty of this, but
> tty devices also are annoying.

Because Unix has always made the hardware details available to
administrators. Times have changed so that users now need to do things
that used to be restricted to administrators.

This historical behavior is a *good* thing. If all devices of type
"foo" are just named "foo" and assigned numbers by the system, then I
have no control over the names. If I don't care which is which, this
isn't a problem. If I do care - for instance, I want to distinguish
between the ethernet interface that's on the internet and the one
that's on my LAN, or I want root to be on the disk with the root file
system on it - then this is a PITA, because every time I add hardware
to the system, or re-arrange the cards in the cage, or similar things,
I risk breaking the system configuration. If the device names are
completely determined by the hardware settings, then this doesn't
happen.

Real world examples of this type of breakage include a FreeBSD 4.x
system with SCSI disks that failed to boot when a USB mass storage
device was plugged into it, and a Solaris system that started swapping
on it's Ingres raw database partition after a disk was added.

If a system is meant for desktop use where you typically have at most
one of anything, then hiding the names from the users is a good
thing. In a server environment, where you may have multiple instances
of several different device types, then being able to easily tell
which is which is a good thing.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.