On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 13:59:28 -0800
"Garrett D'Amore" <garrett_damore@tadpole.com> wrote:

> Marcin Jessa wrote:
> > Hi guys.
> >
> > Testing the CARP patch of Liam I noticed that creating 
> > of new devices like bridge or carp requires giving them a 
> > specific number, i.e bridge0 or carp0. 
> > I was wondering if you think it would be a good idea to have 
> > the device numbers being bumped up automatically like on 
> > FreeBSD if numbers are not explicitly given.
> > So ifconfig carp create would create carp0 and running 
> > the command again would create carp1, etc.
> > Is there any reason for this not being implemented?
> > One more thing that must be a heritage from the past is
> > ifconfig which needs -a flag to show all the network devices
> > instead of just ifconfig. Is there any reason for that too?
> >   
> 
> You need to create device nodes in order to have dynamic device
> numbers.  This also means you need to create some persistent database
> containing the mapping.   Right now, we don't have anything like that. 
> The (mythical?) devfs project could address this, however.

Ok, thanks.
 
> As far as ifconfig, ifconfig behaves that way (needing -a to show all
> interfaces) on other operating systems as well.  For example, without
> arguments, ifconfig on Solaris shows a help message, just as on NetBSD.
> 
> I would vote *against* changing that behavior of ifconfig.    The help
> message for ifconfig may actually be useful to some folks.

We already have ifconfig -h and man ifconfig...
To be honest it's pretty annoying if one has to type -a when simple ifconfig
could do the same thing.

Marcin