Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 02:10:13PM +0200, Pieter Lenaerts wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 12:59:24PM +0200, Thomas Orgis wrote:
> > Am Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:24:28 +0200
> > schrieb Pieter Lenaerts <e-type AT sourcemage.org>:
[...]
> > I've learned that the MAC is _the_ way to identify a NIC - as long as
> > one hasn't fiddled with it before.
> 
> the point is that we want to fiddle with it.
> mac is volatile in this story, which makes it unusable as unique
> identifier.
> 
> > I think it would be enough to separate the fields for setting and getting
> > the mac (MAC, DEVICE_MAC) and stay with the mac as identifier.
> 
> just evaluate some of the use cases and you'll see right away that
> they _can_ _not_ do the job once the mac has been changed.
> 
> you _can_ _not_ use a volatile field as an identifier.
> 
> > So only who really intends to does change the mac of the device -
> > I think that someone _really_ should know what he is up to, anyway,
> > and should be prepared for any slight discomfort.
> 
> personnally I think we should either get device renaming and setting
> macs out of netconf or make it robust so that it does what it seems to
> provide.
> 
> "slight discomforts" and "oh, it only works under circumstances X, Y
> and Z" are crap, so either our stuff does a good job or it doesn't say
> it can do the job.

Agreed. Overall I'd say remove the MAC spoofing from our tools. Make our
tools support persistent device naming based on MAC, and let the user
deal with stuff himself if he wants spoofing.
MAC spoofing really isn't such a common use case imo, persistent device
names are.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org