Network Vanity Naming coming to OpenSolaris
Network interface vanity naming lets you change the name used to refer to a network interface. Anyone who manages Solaris (or any other Linux/UNIX) servers is familiar with the network naming scheme and knows how it can be a bit challenging to remember which nic to look at when troubleshooting a problem, especially on servers and/or networks you don’t deal with frequently. In the past you may have had something like this:
| Network Interface | Network |
| e1000g0 | admin |
| e1000g1 | backup |
| e1000g2 | web |
Of course, this may vary greatly between your servers. Some may have more or fewer interfaces, others machines will have interface names that differ based on the hardware such as the X4100/x4200 m2 series, which have two nge interfaces and two e1000g interfaces (which I find annoying, but with vanity names a lot of that type of pain goes away). When the code from the OpenSolaris Vanity Naming project hits the street (probably a month or so for OpenSolaris Community Edition users), you will be able to use dladm to provide an alias that will work for all typical commands.
Once you have set your vanity names up like this:
root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g0 admin
root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g1 backup
root@host# dladm rename-link e1000g2 web
It will be really nice to be able to use commands like:
root@host# ifconfig backup
or
root@host# snoop -d web
Check out Sebastien Roy’s blog post for more details.