Danek Duvall wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 06:34:37PM -0400, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
>
>
>> But I think we could do better than to force users to pick printers by
>> mac address or ip address.
>>
>
> That's not what this is about -- I think that as long as a human-readable
> name is available, that will be used on the usual label a printer gets when
> presented to a human being.
>
> I was wondering more about when a printer disappears from one IP address
> and gets added again with another -- say, the DHCP lease times out, and
> it's not statically assigned -- will the system be able to recognize that
> it's the same printer, only under a different IP address, and do whatever
> reconfig is necessary without the user ever needing to know about the
> change. (Unless they go diving, in which case they get what they deserve. :)
>
> It sounds like the serial number will be used for that if it's available,
> falling back to the IP. And if the MAC address is the fallback, it might
> be better.
>
When a printer changes IP address, it drops out of the HAL device tree
and reappears at a new path in the tree with it's original serial
number. If it doesn't have one, I don't currently fallback to anything,
though I originally prototyped it to fallback to one based on MAC
address, which should be static and unique to the device.
-Norm
