Can anyone explain at more length what's really going on in ifconfig? The situation is this: I'm trying to get vrrpd or something like it working in a HiperSockets or virtualized QDIO environment. Adding an IP address to the interface works fine. However, if I try to add an address that another guest machine already owns, ifconfig succeeds, but I get a message from the qeth module that it can't set the address. The actual vrrpd implementation fails here too, because the qeth driver refuses to set the vrrpd address, but can't really report it back to vrrpd. At least, I think that's what's going on.
Then the machine that added the address can see it just fine, but no one else, of course, can. According to IBM, on page 127 of their device driver manual, this is because ifconfig has no way to accept a failure to set an IP address from its adapter. What's up with that? I don't see any elegant way around this. The klugey way I see is to look at the last X messages logged, look for the ones qeth emitted, and parse those strings to find the "This didn't work" message. If I find it, ifconfig my new address down, because it didn't *really* work. That seems, to put it mildly, suboptimal. Anyone have a better idea? Adam
