From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261463AbTJFLKx (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Oct 2003 07:10:53 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261476AbTJFLKx (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Oct 2003 07:10:53 -0400 Received: from mail3.ithnet.com ([217.64.64.7]:54413 "HELO heather-ng.ithnet.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S261463AbTJFLKw (ORCPT ); Mon, 6 Oct 2003 07:10:52 -0400 X-Sender-Authentication: net64 Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2003 13:10:51 +0200 From: Stephan von Krawczynski To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Alias names for network devices? Message-Id: <20031006131051.107510d0.skraw@ithnet.com> Organization: ith Kommunikationstechnik GmbH X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.6 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello all, does anybody have an idea how to map a static device name to a network device with dynamic appearance (e.g. ppp) ? What I mean is something like: static name : customer1 dynamic name: ppp25 The mapping should be made available at ip-up time, or better there should be an _empty_ device which can be mapped on some existing dynamic device name and should become empty again after its removal. I know this sounds like a user-space question, but the kernel-question behind is: is this concept possible at all? Can some userspace tool be written to perform something like this? The usage pattern is obviously doing SNMP statistics on users with varying interface names. Don't beat me for the subject line, I know alias ethernet devices are meant to be something else, but how else would you call a second name for an existing device? Regards, Stephan