Re: issue: deleting one IP alias deletes all

[Tim Hockin <thockin@sun.com>]

"Matthew G. Marsh" wrote:

> The original thought refers to the old concept of address "class" where is
> a "class" (think subnet) went away then there was no need (and indeed
> incorrect) behaviour to still be able to have addresses on it. Thus when
> the primary address is deleted you should clear all addresses within that

I don't really think the original thought matters.  What matters is that
the behavior is 
a) non-obvious - you don't expect it
b) undetectable - you can't find out which alias is "primary"
c) inconsistent - some aliases act differently that other aliases

All of these violate the principle of least surprise.  Whether it was
intentional or not, it behaves like a nasty hack, or worse, a bug.  It is
easily fixed, and should be.

> Again - if you do not like this behaviour do not use the primary/secondary
> addressing scopes. Use /32.

Why should user-land be forced to work around what is obviously (to the
vast majority of people in this discussion) a mis-feature?

-- 
Tim Hockin
Systems Software Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Cobalt Server Appliances
thockin@sun.com