Ignatios Souvatzis <is@netbsd.org> writes:
> On Sun, Dec 07, 2003 at 11:09:24AM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>
>> Would anyone mind if I replaced that with
>> netstat -in | cut -c 1-6,44-80 | fgrep -v "*" | uniq
>> which would produce this far more elegant and IMHO far more useful report?:
>> 
>> network:
>> Name      Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts Oerrs Colls
>> lo0        1948     0     1948     0     0
>> wi0      544786     0   359623   115  5279
>
> while the packet statistics are more readable... the address information 
> might well be useful to have a log of whether the addresses changed. And the
> * devices might be useful to see whether devices were configured/unconfigured.
>
> Maybe split it into an active interface statistics section (like you proposed)
> and the full stuff, maybe with the statistics columns removed?

I'm trying to make the output simpler and more to the point.  The
general problem is that people do not read verbose output that is spat
at them night after night. I get reports from something like 10
machines. For the most part, I ignore them because I can't possibly
read all the output. I've made several commits to try to reduce the
amount of output we see. If we add *even more* output, we're going to
make the problem worse, not better.

From what I can tell, the general function of the nightly network
interface report is so that you can note if there are unusual numbers
of errors on an interface. Getting many many lines of output that
won't even fit into 80 columns so you can't scan down it works poorly
for this. The new report is very easy to read for this purpose.

If you really want, I could produce an option for verbose
vs. non-verbose output in the script, but I'm highly reluctant to make
the problem worse by including *both*.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com