John Plocher writes: > James Carlson wrote: > > Renaming a driver is a serious pain. > > Are they changing a driver name or are they simply changing the > network device they are using? Yes they are similar things...
There's really no difference in terms of networking configuration breakage. > This is a common enuf task on systems with multiple network interfaces > that there should be some easy (easier?) way to do this - changing from > qfe2 to qfe3 for my sunray network at home didn't require all that pain... Sure. For trivial cases, it's not too hard to get it right or to "luck into" a working configuration. However, the names of network interfaces (including, yes, "qfe2") are administrative units that are available to and used by *dozens* of applications and configuration components throughout the system. When you change one, there simply are no tools (other than perhaps find/xargs/grep -- good luck if you have configuration systems based on something other than plain text files) that can help you deal with the aftermath. You have to "remember" where you or any other administrator or user of the system may have used the name. That's why I referenced the previous ipge case. It's the same inherent problem that caused us to deny that case. Yes, vanity naming solves the problem pretty neatly. No, vanity naming doesn't exist yet and this case isn't dependent on it. The best we can do is to warn users that such a name change is *in the general case* infeasible. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
