James Carlson wrote:

>Steven Stallion writes:
>  
>
>>I was afraid of that.
>>
>>I threw together a quick patch last night which simply diabled the
>>command in ifconfig that sets a new destination address (which results
>>in the POINTOPOINT flag being set on the interface); nothing fancy.
>>    
>>
>
>There are two potential problems here.
>
>I consider the problem in ifconfig to be at worst a cosmetic problem,
>and perhaps not even a problem at all: it allows the user to generate
>an ioctl that by rights ought to fail.  As a design matter, I don't
>really see that as a problem worth fixing, unless it somehow doesn't
>manage to handle the error returns correctly.
>
>The other problem is the kernel.  It's _allowing_ you to do something
>that's clearly wrong.  There's no getting around that one -- broadcast
>type interfaces simply do not have a configured "destination address"
>and can never have one.  Allowing the ioctl to "succeed" -- and worse
>yet corrupting the interface state as a result -- is a clear-cut bug.
>  
>

Why shouldn't I be able to do:
# ifconfig bge0 1.2.3.4 5.6.7.8 up
if the cable that from bge0 goes to bge0 on another box?
That sure seems like "point-to-point" to me.



>>Either way, what is the best method to proceed? I submitted a bug last
>>night with a category of networking / ifconfig (there is a reference to
>>this thread in the description).
>>    
>>
>
>I don't think that's the right thing to fix.
>  
>

I agree.

I think what needs fixing, in the first instance, is to allow
ifconfig to reset IFF_POINTTOPOINT if it is setting the
broadcast address or netmask.

Darren

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