ETHERS(5) | File Formats Manual | ETHERS(5) |
ethers
— Ethernet
host name data base
The ethers
file maps Ethernet MAC
addresses to host names. Lines consist of an address and a host name,
separated by any number of blanks and/or tab characters. A ‘#’
character indicates the beginning of a comment; characters up to the end of
the line are not interpreted by routines which search the file.
Each line in ethers
has the format:
ethernet-MAC-address
hostname-or-IP
Ethernet MAC addresses are expressed as six hexadecimal numbers separated by colons, e.g. "08:00:20:00:5a:bc". The functions described in ethers(3) and ether_aton(3) can read and produce this format.
The traditional use of ethers
involved
using hostnames for the second argument. This may not be suitable for
machines that don't have a common MAC address for all interfaces (i.e., just
about every non Sun machine). There should be no problem in using an IP
address as the second field if you wish to differentiate between different
interfaces on a system.
ethers
file resides in
/etc.The ethers
file format was adopted from
SunOS and appeared in NetBSD 1.0.
A name server should be used instead of a static file.
November 7, 2000 | NetBSD 10.99 |