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Date: Wed, 16 May 2001 10:02:04 +0200
From: Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>
To: Jonathan Lundell <jlundell@pobox.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <andrewm@uow.edu.au>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants
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In-Reply-To: <p0510033db727cdc4a244@[207.213.214.37]>; from jlundell@pobox.com on Tue, May 15, 2001 at 11:56:41PM -0700
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On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 11:56:41PM -0700, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
> At 12:31 PM +1000 2001-05-16, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >  > When I ifconfig one of a collection of interfaces, I'm very much
> >>  talking about the specific physical interface connected via a
> >  > specific physical cable to a specific physical switch port.
> >>
> >
> >Yes, it can be a security trap as well - physically move a card and
> >your firewall rules end up being applied to the wrong connection.
> >
> >The 2.4 kernel allows you to rename an interface.  So you can build
> >a little database of (MAC address/name) pairs. Apply this after booting
> >and before bringing up the interfaces and everything has the name
> >you wanted, based on MAC address.
> >
> >Andi Kleen has an app which does this:
> >
> >	ftp://ftp.firstfloor.org/pub/ak/smallsrc/nameif.c
> >
> >but apparently some additional kernel work is needed to make
> >this work 100% correctly.  I do not know what the specific
> >problem is.
> 
> There's a bit of a catch 22, though, if you don't have unique MAC 
> addresses in the system (across multiple interfaces). It's common 
> practice in the SPARC world (Solaris, anyway) for all the interfaces 
> to default to a single system-wide MAC address. The fact that MAC 
> addresses are at least semi-volatile is also bothersome.
> 
> It's also  true that some buses simply don't yield up physical 
> locations (ISA springs to mind,

ISA is quite fine, you can use the i/o space as physical locations.

> and I gather that FC is squishy that 
> way), but it's desirable to be able to make the connection all ways 
> (eth# <-> bus location <-> physical location <-> MAC address) in a 
> uniform manner. (Where MAC address might be something else in a 
> non-Ethernet domain.)

Yes.

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs