> > Not only that, it becomes impossible to tell (in software, from
> > user-land, without special hacks) N weeks after you've booted you're
> > system, which connector you're using...  (syslogs age out, and dmesg
> > accumulates...)
> 
> Are you suggesting you have _both_ connectors plugged in? If you don't, 
> all you have to do is to look at which cable is plugged in. Plugging both 
> of them in seems a bit strange to me.

Your X-ray vision must be good... _I_ can't see through two locked
doors, can you?

My point: you shouldn't need physical access to a machine to
administer it sanely.  Indeed, i've "administered" and even
occasionally done kernel development on machines on the other side of
the country...  Serial consoles make life a lot easier, and there's no
reason somebody should have to have physical access to the machine to
tell how it's configured, if that's at all reasonable to do in
software.

... and, as previously noted, doing it they way that has been suggsted
is unnecessarily different than all of the other ethernet drivers...


cgd