In article <15331.10474.235565.724314@senator.nodewarrior.org>,
Dan Debertin <airboss@nodewarrior.org> wrote:
>Allow me to say from the get-go that I realize that this question is
>flame-bait. It is not intended to be such -- the question came up in a
>technical discussion, and none concerned had a technical answer. That
>said, what I want is a technical answer, not something that belongs on
>-advocacy. Okay? Good.

>To wit, then, what I want to know is why *BSD is using the underlying
>hardware as the basis for the names of network interfaces, i.e. xl0,
>ep0, rtk0, etc. I know there are historical reasons, and that almost
>every other UNIX out there (except one :) does what *BSD does, but it
>_seems_ better from a usage & automation (scripting) standpoint to
>have all ethernet interfaces called simply "ethX". Why should userland
>have to care about what the hardware is?
>
>The possible reasons I could come up with were history -- "it's always
>been that way and no-one wants to/has time to change it" -- or a
>technical design reason that I'm not thinking of. 

And we all know which one that INUX is. My opinion about the eth0
and hda1-n naming is that it makes it easy for newbies to deal with
the OS, and documentation and script writing does not have to be
special-cased/smart. Unfortunetely there are some undesirable side
effects. Upgrading from 2.2.x to 2.4.12 swapped my ethernet cards
:-( Also, try deleting hda6 and hda7 in order to coalesce them into
one. Do you know what happens? You said nobody does this? I'll tell
you anyway. It renumbers 8 to 6, 9 to 7 and so on. Imagine now that
your root was in 8... You need to rerun lilo to fix that. You also
need to edit fstab, exports, foo, bar etc. The lossage spreads
like spilled oil. Forgot to do one thing? Have your repair cd/floppy
handy. Try to add the space you recovered from 6 and 7... It will
become the first free one - for me hda11.  Now the partition order
does not reflect anymore the order they appear on the disk. You'll
say other unixes do the same for scsi disks. Yes, but they provide
a way to pin them down.

christos