[hobbit] bbwin 0.10 available

[Sebastian]

Sebastian <mailto:spa at syntec.co.uk> wrote:
> Henrik Stoerner <mailto:henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
>> 
>> Etienne writes:
>>> With the centralized mode, you will see that you get graphs for each
>>> of your networks connections. However, for Windows, the names are
>>> too long compared to the unix name (eth0, eri0..). So, at this
>>> time, I use the mac address of the network card for the graph name.
>>> Would you prefer to use the name by making a very short name ? the
>>> ip address ? or is the mac address fine ?
>> 
>> There's really two sides to this issue. One thing is to identify the
>> network interface from one poll to the next, so we put the right data
>> into the RRD files - for this we can use any identifier that is
>> guaranteed to be a)unique and b)permanent. Another thing is to
>> present the interface name in some sensible way on the graph.
>> 
>> I don't really like using the MAC address, because it is difficult to
>> relate to anything meaningful - I wouldn't know that my primary
>> interface is 00:0E:A6:CE:D6:85, but I do know it's called "eth0".
>> I've had the same problem for the SNMP data collection, so I have
>> come up with an "rrd.meta" file that can map the ID of the network
>> interface into a text that appears on the graph. The code isn't
>> pretty, and it is
>> static data that must be maintained by hand - if anyone has a better
>> suggestion, please speak up.
> 
> The default name of an ethernet network connection on Windows
> is 'Local Area
> Connection' with ' #1', etc. when there is more than one. Is
> that too long?
> If so, it is extremely easy to rename the network connection within
> Windows to something shorter e.g. LAN1, LAN2, etc. or whatever one
> wants. It seems
> to me that using this name would be most appropriate, since
> it would be
> guaranteed to correspond to what is visible in the machine 'Network
> Connections' GUI, or am I missing something? Obviously, as
> Henrik implies,
> the actual data will need to be associated with the MAC
> address, so that
> renaming the NIC wouldn't screw up historical data.

Actually, thinking more about this, one would probably not want to use the
MAC address, since one might change a given NIC from being on one network to
being on another network while remaining in the same machine. At the same
time, one could easily rename the NIC in Windows to show the change, but
obviously one can't change the MAC address. It would be better for the data
before and after the change of network (i.e. change of name) to be separate
since there is no real relation between the two, other than the fact that
they used the same hardware. Network connection names are guaranteed to be
unique in Windows (XP at least).

Kind regards,

Sebastian