On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 05:52:45PM +0200, Quentin Garnier wrote:

> It'd actually be pretty easy to have a "ifconfig whatever0 rename eth0"
> command [..]
> The kernel part of this is a 5 minutes job,

So perhaps it could be included even in 4.0? In my opinion, it could be
really very handy feature - prepare all the relevant scripts (like ipf) using
the "labels" for network interfaces, and in the future just taking care about
/etc/ifconfig.something.

The name of interface, which will be quite independent of the used card, is
one thing; but the second "pro" is possibility to name such interfaces in
more intuitive manner, f.e. as I wrote before: "to_internet", "to_lan",
"world_interface" etc.

Yes, I realize, that - as Tobias wrote - one can live without that. But one
can live without DNS service too, using just numbers for addressing. So, why
we're using DNS anyway?

> although it might need some security considerations: you don't want to be
> able to do this under securelevel >= 1 (replace with relevant
> kauth(9)-speech equivalent ;-).  There's locking to consider, too.

...and some little check-outs: I mean f.e., that the destination "label"
shouldn't be the term already reserved for "officially" named interfaces
(like "ep0", "ex0", "rtk0"...), check for whether "label" isn't used twice
(for two different interfaces), check for characters used for label ...and
so on.
-- 
				pozdrawiam / regards

						Zbigniew Baniewski