We aren't trying to come up with new rocks to carry; we sent the proposal Peter and I discussed to netdev to have char devices; we got shot down, and GregKH suggested this installer-based approach... Installer guys hate it. Repeat. :-(
-- Matt Domsch Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Jones [mailto:pjones@redhat.com] Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 3:09 PM To: Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer Cc: Iyer, Shyam; Hargrave, Jordan; Rose, Charles; Domsch, Matt Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL]: Support Alternate Network Device Naming Schemes
Please don't send mails like this to anaconda-devel-list and netdev at the same time. The lists serve two completely unrelated purposes.
On 11/27/2009 04:42 AM, Narendra K wrote:
... I think the UI suggested here is really bad, as is the process behind it. Adding a "pick your network device name" step anywhere in anaconda, even in kickstart, is a bad plan. A better plan would be something like:
1) make kickstart accept various different names by using libnetdevname or something similar 2) make libnetdevname capable of telling us a reasonable name for an interface for user display (i.e. smbios name with spaces instead of _ or somesuch) 3) display and log those names (and /possibly/ the real interface name) where appropriate, which might include something like a "details" section describing a particular interface.
- In addition to the default ethN names the user can check against
the available naming conventions and the wizard would show the names the interfaces will be renamed to.
What ever happened to the plan of making OS tools (i.e. anaconda, NetworkManager, and ifup, but not necessarily ifconfig) use libnetdevname to do this translation, and leaving the kernel names like they've always been, which people are used to and people who aren't effected by won't have to deal with, and having libnetdevname do the entire translation itself in userland? This is what mdomsch and I discussed on Oct 30th.
I'm getting tired of the cycle of:
1) dell comes up with a suggestion 2) people don't like the way they're doing it 3) dell goes away and talks amongst themselves 4) dell comes up with a suggestion that ignores the feedback 5) goto step 2.
- The moment the user hits the Next button all interfaces are
renamed as per the Naming convention they have selected. 3. Any further network communication would be using the new names. 4. Ifconfig would show names like "Embedded_NIC_1" and not eth0 etc.
Renaming the devices is exactly what we were trying to get around by making userland tools use libnetdevname.
This way the OS names of network interfaces would have a co-relation to the chassis names.
You mean the kernel name here, not the "OS" name. And in general, changing the kernel names isn't something we want. That's why we went down the whole aliasing route in the first place!