On Tue October 14 2003 17:19, der Mouse wrote:
> > The problem is that link status is not really one of the exported
> > attributes of net interfaces
>
> Something like it must be; ifconfig prints things like "no carrier"
> when there's no carrier - it has to get that from somewhere....

Of course it's available, the problem is the manner that one should 
employ to obtain such information. This problem exists because there 
have never been any standards associated with such a thing (as far as 
I know), the homogeneity found in network interfaces today is 
unprecedented. The best that can be done in this situation is an 
internally consistent interface to networking data structures and 
events.