On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 01:45:25PM -0400, Denis Voitenko wrote:
> Why was Linux designed so that the IP address and host info had to be stored
> in a bunch of files spread all over the system? Wouldn't it be simpler to
> keep it all in one place?
Strictly speaking, Linux is the kernel, which doesn't store the IP address
anywhere (OK, except for the kernel's idea of what the interface looks like).
The user-space stuff - which I guess is what you're unhappy with - is like that
on most Linux distributions because "that's what UNIX looks like" (not that
there really is a consistent way of doing network config across most Unices
these, AFAIK). You can stick whatever user-space libraries and tools you want
with a Linux kernel - there was a nascent project to port the *BSD user-space
to Linux, I think, but it may have died a death. You could write something
that looked like VMS if you wanted (eww <g>).
I imagine that distributions like RedHat and Caldera OpenLinux /do/ have some
gooey, user-friendly configuration that lets you set the IP address once and
forget it. The thing is, anyone who has to deal with more than one box is
unlikely to want to (a) remember how to use every single vendor-specific
config tool out there, and (b) have to run something that's X-only if they're
remotely admining. You only have to update the DNS maps and set the interface
address, anyway, and those could hardly be combined if you have a non-trivial
DNS setup. The startup script change is only so you don't have to config your
network each time you boot. We often used not to bother to change the startup
scripts on the MicroVAXen at work, for example, as they never got rebooted.
Ever. The only time we did in fact power it down (to physically move the
thing), it didn't come up anyway (icky hardware).
--
No good deed goes unpunished.
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