Re: [PROPOSAL]: Alias names for network interfaces

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Jan Engelhardt wrote:
> On Wednesday 2010-01-13 18:46, Domsch, Matt wrote:
>>> I am less than enthusiastic about the idea as well.  I've come across 
>>> numerous userspace scripts and whatnot that have enough trouble with the 
>>> default route not being through "eth0" let alone anything more 
>>> complex.   Aliases are going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of 
>>> people for little actual gain.
>> The "actual gain" is to provide a deterministic method of naming
>> network devices, in a stateless manner (e.g. w/o hard-coding MAC
>> addresses).  We don't have deterministic naming today.  It only gets
>> worse as we add more NIC ports.
>>
>> The kernel doesn't provide deterministic naming.
>>
>> Renaming from ethN to ethM is racy; often we wind up with devices named
>> 'eth0_rename'.
>>
>> Stephen noted (echoed in Bernd's comment) that the ethN namespace is
>> effectively an ABI (and certainly the 15-character IFNAMESZ is).
>> Userspace tools today expect ethN names.
> 
> Let's get things straight at least. Userspace does not expect eth#.
> You may get away with claiming feature-incompleteness if your program
> has no idea of tun#, sit# gre# and such, but there is also wlan#,
> tap#, and others that are a link/ether device. If a program relies on
> eth#, it is broken and should either be fixed or left dead in its
> corner.

I agree, this is simply broken. iptraf is one of these sad examples
which has been annoying me for years.