https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436857 User aron.ujvari@microsec.hu added comment https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=436857#c3 --- Comment #3 from Aron Ujvari <aron.ujvari@microsec.hu> 2008-12-11 04:38:01 MST --- I think, abosolutely yes. There are many use cases where a dummy interface can makes life easier. Nowadays these are VPN, load balancing, failover or just simple networking issues, ex. just need some more "real" network interfaces. Personally I use dummy interface for load balancing and failover implementation. I have two servers that acts as a load balancer. To do balancing I need a director who forwards requests to the balancer servers. As I have only two machines one of them have to be the director server also at a time. But I need failover too, so I have to move this director function to the other server in case of failure. Using direct routing LVS server for load balancing requires that each balancer servers have the service IP configured. On the other hand for the director functionality I also have to configure this service IP on the servers as they do failover for this function, but only on one of them at a time. This two requirement is just the opposite, can't be fulfilled at the same time. At least not on one interface. On my public interface I do the failover, and only one public interface has the service IP address configured. Meanwhile on the dummy interface, that have ARP disabled in sysctl, I have the service IP configured all the time on all the servers. Technically this probably also be able to work on the loopback interface, but then I had to mix two functionality on the loopback interface and I prefer to avoid that if possible. Loopback interface is primarily for serve data packets that really loops back to the server. I wouldn't like to change it's configuration just to serve as a silent interface of the service IP. The loopback interface is an important part of the system so it is the best not to hack it while it is working well. Not even YaST is capable to configure it. With dummy interface I can move this latter functionality to an other interface where it won't interfere with other functionality and I would be able to use YaST to make this setup if it had been configured well on boot. This way the the failover and load balancer configuration (on the same machine) is not a hack, but it's clean and correct from the administrator's perspective. Moreover, regardless of that it is useful or not YaST has dummy interface handling capability, but it is not working well. As long YaST has this functionality the current behaviour is definitely a bug in my opinion. And as I mentioned this functionality can be really useful probably not for most of the users but for some experienced ones for sure. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.