[CentOS] RHEL 6.1 beta

[Peter A]

On Monday, May 02, 2011 09:57:19 AM Steve Clark wrote:
> On 05/02/2011 09:38 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > On Monday, May 02, 2011 06:48:37 AM Christopher Chan wrote:
> >> biosdevname for nics...bye bye eth0!
> > 
> > Not by default, and according to the release notes only for certain Dell
> > servers ATM.
> > 
> > But, yes, a different way of looking at NICs is coming down the pipe. 
> > It's about time.
> 
> EGADS Why?  After working with FreeBSD for ten years it so nice not to have
> to worry is this rl0, vr0, em0, fxp0, bge0, ed0, etc in networking
> scripts. Why would you want to go back to that?

I couldn't agree more... One of the things in Solaris that was always a pain. 
Just write a monitoring script that enumerates all devices... On linux you 
simply write a loop, start with eth0 and go up. On Solaris, you parse 
path_to_inst, then go from there iterating over the devices and instances... 
Not real hard to do but makes a script go from 80 lines on Linux to about 250 
lines on Solaris. 
Oh and then of course there is the lovely implementation in Oracle RAC (and 
many other clustered pieces of software) that wants the same interface name on 
all hosts. Good luck finding two identical systems for the demo tomorrow 
afternoon :) 

Essentially, having names per driver sounds good - until you actually lived 
it. Then you realize you gain virtually nothing (how often have you really 
looked at the cabeling of a server after its initial install) and made it 
significanly more complex to script and maintain.

Peter.


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