Review needed: netspeed_applet

[Per Bjornsson]

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 11:16 -0600, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 09:13:42AM -0700, Per Bjornsson wrote:
> > 
> > The Atheros Madwifi driver enjoys being special and calls the device
> > ath0. It really sounds like "known names" (wlanX for the wireless case)
> > get specific icons and the others get the network card by default.
> 
> There is really not much which can stop you from renaming your
> network interfaces in many different ways with a help of 'nameif'.
> I would think that "ath0" or "wlanX" strings are not exceptional
> here although that I never tried.  

They certainly aren't exceptional; there's loads of variability even in
the driver defaults (ethX for orinoco and apparently ipw2100?, athX for
Atheros, raX for some Ralink versions at least, acx100 defaults to wlanX
but has a module parameter switch to change that to ethX...)

> Maybe this facility is not used
> very widely but it is used and for good reasons.  Therefore it is
> definitely a bad juju in various networking tools to rely on some
> specific "known names".

Oh, absolutely, that was the point I was initially trying to make! In
fact, I think that the most used (if not all?) wireless drivers in the
kernel (at least the orinoco driver which I have used) name the cards
eth0 by default; "wlan0" might be inherited from the wavelan driver.
Relying on the name of a device is inherently broken. Luckily, it's not
really used for anything terribly important here, just for choosing the
shown icon; the applet doesn't behave differently depending on the type
of interface apart from that.  If it actually did any real harm I would
have been less happy to see the package included as is.

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University