Subject: Re: link-local address via ifconfig

From: Ingo Oeser <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:02:07 +0200

Hi Anand,

Anand Kumria wrote:
> There are plenty of people who still use ifconfig to list the addresses
> assigned to their network interfaces (I know, ifconfig is broken) and
> who then parse the output.
> 
> However the kernel puts link-local scoped address first if the address
> list of an interface, so an interface like:

> Is there any reason to put the link-local address first in the list?
> 
> I've had a number of bugreports (or outright panic attacks) where the 
> problem turned out to be that ifconfig was reporting the link-local 
> address first, rather than the global/site one.

This can be worked around by defining an "alias interface" this way
"ip address add 169.254.182.108/16 brd 169.254.255.255 scope link dev eth0 label eth0:0"
(see: "label eth0:0" is appended)

So in reality this is no problem for users.

Regards

Ingo Oeser