Idea for (small, simple to implement?) feature request

[fortechitsolutions]

Hi,

Just a quick question, a possible 'feature request' I suppose. Curious if this sounds doable and of use to others:

- Currently in ProxVE there is no way in the GUI to see the MAC address associated with a given physical network interface. I believe it is necessary to look in the logs (dmesg) / via SSH console.

- I was wondering, if this would be a reasonable thing to ask - ie - that the current page which reveals how network interfaces are configured on the system / and how bridge interfaces are configured using those physical interfaces ... could present a concise summary of all NICs present.

For example,

nic / MAC / driver

eth0 / MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:55 / skge
eth1 / MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:56 / e1000
eth2 / MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:57 / bcm
eth3 / MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:58 / sky2


This is something I think "other virtualization solutions" typically display as information visible from the GUI.. and it is quite handy when you have multi-interface systems and you want to unambiguously know which "eth" device is actually associated which a particular interface (mac address).

In particular I had one weird case recently on a ProxVE 1.5 (fully updated) box with 4 interfaces. According to Dmesg output, my skge nic was eth1 and a realtek was eth2. However, in reality - for some reason I'm not quite clear on - the skge was really eth2 and the realtek was really eth1. (this because I could set the MTU to 9000 on the eth2 / and the mac was approriate for the vendor of the skge nic). It wasn't a 'big deal' but meant that I burned a bit more time than expected / desired trying to figure out which interface was physically connected to which cable... I've never seen a case like this before when dmesg clearly identifies all the interfaces but then some are not correct.

Anyhoo. Just a thought. I realize the ProxVE team has very limited time and resources; however, this seems like a pretty 'basic information render' type of request, so I thought I would put it out there.


Thanks!


Tim

 

[tom]

thanks, added to our todo list for 2.x.

 

[udo]

Hi,
for the network-gui I have also one idea of improvement:
a additional nickname for the vmbr-interfaces would be nice.
If you have more of them, names like "dmz", "test-net", "prod" says more than vmbr4...

Udo

 

[resignation]

A quick and easy way to see what NIC is actually assigned to which ethX device is to use the 'ethtool' program via console with the -i flag so you can see the device driver. I dont think it comes installed by default with Proxmox, but a simple 'apt-get install ethtool' will grab and install it for you..

# ethtool -i eth0
driver: tg3
version: 3.96-1
firmware-version: 5703-v2.21a
bus-info: 0000:02:01.0

# ethtool -i eth1
driver: tg3
version: 3.96-1
firmware-version: 5703-v2.21a
bus-info: 0000:02:02.0

Even if the device driver is not clear (as in this case with tg3 being for Broadcom NICs), lspci will show you the same..

# lspci | grep Ethernet
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5703X Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)
02:02.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5703X Gigabit Ethernet (rev 02)

So even if you have a server with a dual port NIC, the increase in the bus-info numbers will indicate which port is which. Lowest being port 1, the others increasing in value. While this method isn't available via the GUI, it will never fail via console and has saved me several times when it comes time to identify which NIC is which, especially when your dealing with hosts with large amounts of interfaces.

Cheers