Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 14:40 -0700, Danek Duvall wrote:
>
>> If you can uniquely identify by serial number in some large percentage of
>> the printers out there, that's probably good enough -- I bet people are
>> more likely to recognize a printer by IP address than MAC address, if they
>> need to get down to it.
>>
>
> Given the diversity of network-attached printers out there, whatever we
> do, we're going to be stuck with messy heuristics. I'd rather not throw
> long strings of numbers into the mix until more human-friendly
> identifiers are exhausted.
>
> At the smallest scale (home office/small office), people are most likely
> to recognize printers by make & model because if there is more than one
> printer, they will be of different types.
>
> At the other end of the scale, the two printers nearest me within Sun's
> burlington office both have SNMP sysName values set sensibly (matching
> the name on the label pasted to the outside of the printer). Both have
> reasonable looking sysLocation values containing sun building codes and
> room numbers. Unfortunately one of them is wrong (right building, wrong
> floor...)
>
> But I think we could do better than to force users to pick printers by
> mac address or ip address.
>
The HAL device tree name is nothing more than a token that is virtually
invisible to the user. The desktop component that actually uses the HAL
device tree entries presents the user with the manufacturer, model,
description information from the device.
-Norm
