James Carlson wrote:
> Peter Memishian writes:
>> As Jim said, POINTOPOINT is really a property of the medium.  You can't
>> magically make an Ethernet interface POINTOPOINT by specifying multiple
>> addresses, you just end up making a big mess.  It seems to me that the
>> syntax covered above is intended to allow POINTOPOINT interfaces to be
>> configured, not to make an interface POINTOPOINT.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't think we can rip out this misbegotten swill too
> easily, as the open source PPP code depends on it.  It'll require some
> careful testing.
> 
> (Oh, how I wish the other vendors hadn't blocked our attempt to add
> DL_PPP to DLPIv2 years ago!)
> 

I was afraid of that.

I threw together a quick patch last night which simply diabled the
command in ifconfig that sets a new destination address (which results
in the POINTOPOINT flag being set on the interface); nothing fancy.

It did leave me wondering; how widespread is the use of this feature?

It appears that ifconfig supports setting a destination address in two
separate functions: setifdstaddr and setiftdst. setifdstaddr was the
only function I was concerned with since it ultimately results in a
SIOCSLIFDSTADDR ioctl call. I'm curious which of the two PPP relies on.

Either way, what is the best method to proceed? I submitted a bug last
night with a category of networking / ifconfig (there is a reference to
this thread in the description).

Regards,

Steve

-- 
Yet magic and hierarchy
arise from the same source,
and this source has a null pointer.

Reference the NULL within NULL,
it is the gateway to all wizardry.
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