Jason McIntyre <[email protected]> wrote: > whereas /etc/netstart is actually doing: > > - configure non-physical: (1) > aggr trunk svlan vlan carp pppoe > - routing (2) > - rest of non-physical: (3) > tun tap gif etherip gre egre mobileip pflow wg > > we could try to keep this list up to date, but it may be easier to just > generally describe what netstart is doing.
I think we goes wrong by trying to maintain these as lists, and part of where this goes wrong is weak definition of the reasons for the ordering. (Meaning, the developers who tweak netstart to handle the concerns I'm about to describe, don't tend to think about the manual page). The (1) list of non-physical can probably be called "link-layer control interfaces". Or let's find a name for this. These devices mutate the presentation of other devices. That's why their configuration needs to be done before the physical device. (2) The physical device is then brought up, including IP addressing. The things in (1) need to be done beforehands, or the physical device is participating in the wrong layer of network. the (3) list of non-physical devices are layer-2 or layer-3 and operate on devices which are already configured with some some sort of "addressing" configured. It would be nice to have our networking people come up with nice names for group (1) and (2); words which succinctly describe the classification like I've done above. We need to increase understanding of this order, rather than just abstractly listing names of devices with complicated behaviours. Once that is done, I still think it is problematic for us to list all devices in each catagory: a) new subsystems will be forgotten b) the order of instantiation will sometimes be listed wrong -- for some of these the order is highly significant. We can try to list as many as possible, but people who want the precise list (and order) should look in the netstart code. The lists will get long and wrong. If we find we cannot maintain the lists correctly because it is duplicated information, man page wording like "such as" could be used, also something which leads people to consider the script source as authoritative, ie. have them go read the script
