[lug] physical/logical network interfaces

[Nick Golder]

On 2005-03-22 10:31 -0700, Hugh Brown wrote:
> I always love responding to my own posts.  So there really are 5 ports,
> the onboard NIC, and two Intel pro 100 dual port cards.
> 
> So the question morphs.  The four ports in the dual port cards have no
> cables in them.  Only the onboard NIC is connected.  So now my conundrum
> is this:
> 
> Why would the kernel allow me to configure eth1 as an interface (and
> receive traffic for that interface) when there's no cable connected to it?
> 
> Is it an artifact of all of the cards using the same driver (e100)?
> 
> This strikes me as obscurely broken.
> 

The kernel sees 5 NICs and enumerates them all.  The question is why
shouldn't the kernel allow you configure a NIC that doesn't have a cable
connected.  The kernel thinks that if you didn't want to be
able to configure them, you probably wouldn't have them installed.

It would strike me as "obscurely broken" if I couldn't configure a NIC
that isn't pysically connected to a network.

-- 
-Nick Golder