Richard Gooch wrote:
>
> David L. Nicol writes:
> >
> > you mean, the way *BSD does it?
>
> Dunno. How does *BSD do it?
when installing freeBSD, you need to identify the hardware you are
using. The different kinds of network cards have different
abbreviations
for purposes of configuring them, instead of eth0 being my network card
regardless of the particular card. The ne2000 is ne0, the smc is
sm0 (or something) and so on. To ease configuration for startuup files
and so forth, there is a big settings file where you edit it (or a
tool edits it for you) to set $ethdevice_0=ne0 or something like that
and then all the scripts refer to, like,
ifconfig up $ethdevice_0 $address_0 $mask_0
because that particular implementation hiding of all the ethernet
cards are ethN, does not appear.
OSF1 is that way too, if you swap your hardware you have to
adjust the configuration, not just the kernel modules.
I like the kernel taking care of that abstraction, it makes creating
a single configuration I can put on heterogenous hardware easier.
Although
a little user-level probing would not be difficult, if all the drivers
were guaranteed to return on failure.
____________________________________________________________________
David Nicol 816.235.1187 nicold@umkc.edu
"With diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly." -- Duff
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 31 2000 - 21:00:21 EST