[vbox-dev] problems with ticket #1498

[Sebastien Roy]

OpenSolaris VirtualBox developers,

A recent thread was started on opensolaris-discuss at opensolaris.org which
caught my attention:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=63220&tstart=0

I was directed at ticket #1498:

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1498

There are a few issues with the discussion in this ticket which I'd like
to discuss.

The first is that it discusses the parsing of _non_ parseable dladm
output format.  The dladm(1M) man page states that "-p" is to be used
for machine parseable output.  The default output format without -p is
for humans, is not meant to be parsed, and is subject to frequent
changes.

The second is that "show-dev" is obsolete, as stated in the man page.
It is obsoleted by "show-phys".

The third is that "show-dev" or "show-phys" are certainly not what you
want to be parsing.  VNICs are created over links, not physical devices.
As such, I'm guessing you simply want to look at the output of
"show-link" (with -p of course).  You can control the fields that are
output using -o.  I don't need to go into too many details, it's all in
the man page.

The fourth is that the output format of dladm is unrelated to the
Crossbow project as the first comment in the ticket suggests.  The
format of the dladm output was changed in OpenSolaris build 83, and was
unrelated to Crossbow.  On a related note, Crossbow is a project under
development, so I'm really surprised to see support for it already in
VirtualBox.  Is this meant for people running unsupported Crossbow
archives from their project page?

Please followup with me or networking-discuss at opensolaris.org if you'd
like to discuss this.

-Seb