Sebastian <mailto:user-7b2156f36779@xymon.invalid> wrote:
Henrik Stoerner <mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid> 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