Nicolas Droux writes: > On Sep 4, 2007, at 8:45 AM, James Carlson wrote: > > > The question I'm asking here is: "why?" > > > > Under what circumstances does it make sense to provide this failure > > mode for administrators? How does it help rather than hinder? > > It provides the user the ability to preserve and enforce the > assignment of factory MAC addresses to virtual machines in a > consolidated environment. If the administrator specifically asks for > a factory MAC address but none are available, then the operation > would fail. The (default) automatic mode is also there for the users > who don't care if a random address is assigned to the VNIC instead.
Yes, I understand what it would do. I still don't see why that's a helpful operation. It clearly provides a special failure mode. What isn't clear is why users of this feature would prefer to have the operation fail rather than having the system provide a best attempt (perhaps with warnings) instead. What are the administrators actually doing with these MAC addresses that causes them to prefer failure? -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
