From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Matti Aarnio Subject: Re: What were the reasons of having mandatory IP address at AX.25 interfaces ? Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 15:02:52 +0200 Message-ID: <20080204130252.GA2537@mea-ext.zmailer.org> References: <47A60A57.5080402@digitalrealm.net> <20080203202819.GX2537@mea-ext.zmailer.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080203202819.GX2537@mea-ext.zmailer.org> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-hams@vger.kernel.org Cc: netdev@vger.kernel.org .. the original reason was apparently that _ifconfig_ blew up when it saw protocols that it didn't understand on network interfaces. Possibly when there was no IP protocol on an interface. This happened on DECNET, and apparently on others too. Thus the SIOCGIFCONF ioctl is not returning much else than interfaces with IP addresses on them, and to get _all_ interfaces, one must read thru /proc/net/dev file. Some reason like that is possibly behind the reason why SIOCGIFCONF does not find anything but PF_INET sockets even when it is run on PF_AX25 type socket.. The "fun" part is that ifconfig does look for all devices in /proc/net/dev. Perhaps we should just make all devices findable with SIOCGIFCONF regardless of what protocols they may support ? And if the ifconfig blows up, the bug is in ifconfig tool, not kernel. Alternatively one could iterate all network devices of protocol family X being enabled when ioctl() is called on socket with PF_x (like PF_AX25.) Can anyone recall any real reason why this would not be acceptable ? /Matti Aarnio