On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 5:17 PM, nixlists <[email protected]> wrote:
> Could someone throw a clue stick? I've read the man pages for netstat
> and route, and I am still not clear what the output of netstat -r
> means exactly in OpenBSD. What does "Link" refer to exactly?
It refers to a network interface at the lowest internal levels of the
kernel, where they're just named and numbered. The routing-socket
interface used by netstat to access the routing table returns that
gateway information for a route in the form of a sockaddr of some
type; those happen to be sockaddr_dl, with type AF_LINK and containing
just an interface index. These routes are used to trigger the
data-link layer processing necessary for actually sending packets (ARP
for IPv4, ND for IPv6, etc).
Note that the link number matches the interface in the last column of
the "netstat -rn" output; the former is the index, the latter is the
name.
> It seems that many, if not most man pages do not describe utility output much.
$ fortune -m 'Documentation is like'
%% (fortunes)
Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and
when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
-- Dick Brandon
$
Philip Guenther
