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On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 09:56:05AM +0200, Havard Eidnes wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 08:44:21PM +0100, David Laight wrote:
> > > Generally resetting stats is a bad idea since you don't actually know
> > > how many different pieces of software are trying to read them.
> > >
> > > Much better is to have a display program capable of showing you the d=
eltas.
> >
> > Agreed, but we already have precedent in ifconfig -z
>=20
> ...and I made that exact same argument when that was introduced, but was
> summarily ignored.  This is bad if you run e.g. an SNMP agent, since
> e.g. the interfaces MIB specifies that the counters must be monotonically
> increasing as long as the agent's uptime increases, and this introduces a
> way for an administrator to break the specified behaviour.

You weren't ignored, you just weren't agreed with. :-)

You're 100% correct. If the host is running SNMP or some such. The problem=
=20
is that a lot of sites don't, and this makes sense for them. In fact, if=20
you aren't running SNMP, resetting counters can be one of the sanest=20
things you can do. :-)

One thing I could see adding (which I don't really have time to do) is add=
=20
a sysctl to disable resetting the counters. If you're running SNMP or some=
=20
such monitoring system, set it as part of /etc/sysctl.conf.

Take care,

Bill

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