Re: Specifying names for tap interfaces

[Roger Pau Monne <roger.pau%citrix.com@localhost>]

Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 04:19:47PM +0100, Roger Pau Monne wrote:
> > Michael Richardson wrote:
> > > > > > > > "Roger" == Roger Pau Monne<roger.pau%citrix.com@localhost>   writes:
> > >      Roger>   Anything that we can control, like tap-%domid.%devid would be
> > >      Roger>   good though. It doesn't have to follow any specific
> > >      Roger>   nomenclature, but it will be good to be able to specify two
> > >      Roger>   integers, one that corresponds to the domain id, and another
> > >      Roger>   one that identifies the specific network card inside that
> > >      Roger>   domain.
> > >
> > > But that, really, Admins hate having %domid in the device name because
> > > it screws up useful things like SNMP/mrtg on those devices.
> > I don't really understand this, why does the name of the interface
> > matters regarding SNMP or mrtg? Is this a privacy related issue?
>
> Because everywhere an interface name appears (ipf.conf, altq.conf,
> mrtg graphs, ...) you have to change it when a domU is restarted.

Yes, I get it, if the name is persistent, then the graphs/statistics can 
be fetched much more easily, the interface name never changes.

What Linux guys do (I think) is rename it using the ip command:

ip link set <old_name> name <new_name>

Or specifying the name of the desired interface during creation:

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/tuntap.txt

But we should look into doing this with the ifconfig command I guess.