On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 07:49:22AM -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 09:49:17AM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote: > > I intend to kill the nick command with nl80211 since it seems to be > > useless. Any objections? > > I can't defend it myself, but I have heard of people using it. > I think some of the distro's init scripts might set it as well? > > Can anyone defend the practice of setting a nickname for a wireless > device?
I think that this was added either based on a non-802.11 protocol or based on a specific hardware/firmware design that had possibility of configuring a name for the client (to be exchanged with some proprietary network management protocol as the device name). After that, this ioctl seems to be just used for binding some arbitrary data to an interface to help scripts etc. In other words, I don't see any real use for this from the view point of IEEE 802.11 networks and it is confusing at best. This may be useful for some setup scripts, but I would rather hope they would use something else instead. The only reason for adding nick command would be to maintain backwards compatibility with some scripts. I do not use any distro configuration mechanisms for setting up wireless, so I do not know what is currently being used. I would not add these ioctls into d80211 unless someone can point out an existing (and widely used) mechanism that depends on these ioctls being available. -- Jouni Malinen PGP id EFC895FA - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
