> But it also occurs to me that calling it a "description" is misleading > if it's really an alternative name. To me, "description" would be > something like "Inter-office VPN" or "4th floor desktops". Yes. I was thinking about something like "VLAN 104" or "easerv" (our internal network name) because I always end up looking up that in /etc/ifconfig.vlan*.
> What's been getting discussed here I would call an "alias", though I'd > want to find a different word for it because ifconfig(8)'s command line > already has an "alias" keyword. Well, isn't "alias" an abbreviation for "inet alias"? If so, you could use something like "name alias" for the new functionality. > Really, though, this whole thing is a botch. Berkeley created a new > namespace for network interface names when they should have been just > nodes in /dev, and what we're discussing here is a pseudo-ln for that > other namespace. The _right_ fix, it seems to me, is to move network > interfaces into /dev (possibly in a subdirectory?), where they should > have been all along, and then use ln, ln -s, mv, whatever, there. Yes. But it's far too late to /move/ them, I guess. Couldn't that be done via a pseudo-filesystem (which you could mount to /dev/net) or a part of kernfs (which you could symlink to /dev/net) where a rm /dev/net/vlan7 would be equivalent to ifconfig vlan7 destroy, a ln /dev/net/extnet3 /dev/net/vlan7 would make "extnet3" an alias name for vlan7 and ln -s "external net to firewall" /dev/net/vlan7 would make that an interface description for vlan7?