linux-ipsec: An interesting happened to me on the way to the net...

  This morning I ran into an interesting problem that I think illustrates both the need for accurate documentation and why I don't like 'positional' command line arguments.   I had just installed OpenBSD and booted it up, everything seemed fine until I tried to use the network, which was totally broken. I poked around for a few minutes and discovered that by naming the host "down.toad.com" I had caused a comedy (nay, tragedy!) of errors such that "down.toad.com" was truncated to "down" and passed to ifconfig where it's documentation said a hostname (or IP address) should be.
  But as we all know "down" is a perfectly valid argument to ifconfig most anyplace in the command line! My interface never came up and all the routing after that was hosed. Vhat a mess. Very hard to find as well...

  So I wish to make two points here. First this is an argument for long and explicit command line arguments. If I can write a script that says '--hostname="foo"' then the script can not break in the way that happened to me today.
  Note that I say above, 'can', one still might provide quick forms of commands for everyday use by experienced users but the stronger forms must be there so that non-brittle systems can be built.   The first person who says that I should not have named a host "down" gets shown to the nearest airlock...

  The second point is that the OpenBSE man page documents the command in such a way the the author of the /etc/netstart script used it correctly, it's just that in reality the command worked differently then the doc said it did.
  Having the technical doc reflect the actual command is very important, else folks will write to the doc and the system will become very brittle.

  Enough Sunday Morning Horror story's, back to work.

		||ugh Daniel
		hugh@toad.com

			Systems Testing & Project mis-Management
			The Linux FreeS/WAN Project
			
http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeswan