Using any network interface whatsoever

[David Taylor]

On Sat, 08 Apr 2006, Mike Meyer wrote:
> 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.

That doesn't quite work, though.  Unless you require everyone wanting
to distinguish between LAN and WAN interfaces uses different types
of hardware for each card, they'll still end up with xl0 and xl1
(or whatever), which is in no way better than eth0 and eth1,
except that it means you have the option of looking up what on earth
"xl" actually means to get a vague description of what type of hardware
it is, rather than checking the dmesg for xlX or ethX.

-- 
David Taylor