| |||||||||||||
machines, not interfacesmachines, not interfacesPosted Aug 22, 2003 17:44 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Harping on ARP by iabervon Parent article: Harping on ARP
>I am somewhat mystified by people's insistance that a Linux associates IP >addresses with machines, not interfaces. When I do /sbin/ifconfig, I get: That was certainly my view before today, but analyzing the wording of some of the documentation, I can see that the philosophy these people are espousing, and have built into Linux, is this: An address by definition identifies something. What an IP address identifies is a host, not an interface on a host. Unlike most addresses, IP addresses aren't unique for a host -- many IP addresses can identify the same host. Nonetheless, the statements above that an interface "has" an IP address and Linux "associates an IP address with" an interface are true. The IP address associated with an interface is routing information -- it and the netmask determine which nodes Linux will try to reach through that interface. There are other controls that refine this routing more. I'm pretty sure the reason this is set up in such a nonobvious way is that the original model really was IP address identifies interface. Otherwise, ifconfig wouldn't set any IP address and you would have to use a separate routing command to declare which IP addresses are to be reached through which interfaces.
(Log in to post comments)
|
|||||||||||||