> Is the "magic ioctl" approach ugly? Sure. But it's fairly well contained
> to just one program (ifconfig), and everybody else just uses that. I think
> it's less horrible than the alternatives right now.
If it *were* all contained in ifconfig, you'd be right, but that isn't
even remotely true.
There are a *huge* number of programs that know about network interfaces.
Apart from ifconfig, we have route, routed, iptables, ip, bootloads of
admin scripts for device configuration, for firewalling, pppd anmd
scripts, arp, dhcpd, portsentry, and I haven't even really scratched the
surface here.
Sure, in the old times, when you could get Unix(tm) with or without the
"networking option" for extra money, there wasn't much. But that has
dramatically changed in these Internet times.
MfG Kai
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