[libvirt] [Fwd: first cut public API for physical host interface configuration]

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 02:45:51PM -0700, David Lutterkort wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 12:40 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > Well you'll need to be able to query  live interfaces anyway, because
> > you'll need to be able to report IPv4 addresses assigned by DHCP and
> > report IPv6 addresses that auto-configure themselves.
> 
> What's the use case behind that ? I would argue that any infrastructure
> that requires libvirt to get addresses of interfaces is fundamentally
> broken - I can see the case for getting the MAC address of interfaces on
> a host, but the MAC/IP address mapping really needs to be managed
> centrally.

Simply that if the admin configures a new NIC using DHCP / IPV6 they will
wish to know what address it got after it was brought online. libvirt
does not have todo anything with these addresses, merely provide info
about them in the XML for the interface. Applications using libvirt may
do stuff with the addresses, for example they may wish todo a direct
node<->node migration over an interface that's separate from the one
used for talking to libvirtd. As such they'd need to know the IP addr
of such an interface.

NB, I don't think this neccessarily has to be part of netcf library. If
netcf wants to restrict its scope to management of config files, and 
ability to bring an interface up & down that's no problem. libvirt can
provide the functionality for getting 'live' IP address info, and getting
I/O statistics, and other such stuff.

Daniel
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