On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 3:40 PM, James Carlson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Peter Memishian writes: >> >> > Yeah, and naming them with my new vanity names will help me keep them >> > straight, but 'dladm show-phys' will map the vanity names back tothe >> > swapped physical names still. >> >> Does that really cause a problem? In general, administrators should >> rarely be interacting with the device names, so it's not clear to me why >> they'd care about those names. > > This sounds a bit like the old "so how do I know which device name > goes with which wire?" problem. I think Kyle was making assumptions > about how the device numbering and naming worked, and how that ended > up geographically identifying devices (at least _somewhat_). > > PCI enumeration run with different BIOS devices enabled and disabled > throws one wrench into that idea, while vanity naming tosses in > another (and possibly a solution as well). > > What we're missing (and have often discussed) is some clear way to > associate datalink and/or IP level objects with the physical wires and > ports that those things are using, so that a user can insert or remove > a wire with some confidence that he's not doing something horribly > wrong. > > Today, I think the best we've got is plugging in the wire, and then > running snoop on successive devices until the "right" one is found.
On sparc at least, while the enumeration (i.e. which is bge0 an which is bge2) can change, the resulting path in /devices doesn't. As a result, you can take the /etc/path_to_inst entry, and map it to a physical hardware location (though it's tedious). Is this not possible for at least some (presumably well-known i.e. non-whitebox) x86 systems? While not ideal, my link layer discovery project might (once I actually finish it) help at least somewhat -- it can potentially allow you to figure out where the other end is plugged in. It still would be useful to (at least where supported) map out the driver name -> physical location. Might the fm topology library help (it's not really documented, so it's capabilities are a bit of an unknown to me)? _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list [email protected]
