James Bottomley wrote:
My problem with auto generated is that it's provably impossible to generate globally unique numbers for WWNs without some internal source of uniqueness (I know sparcs have this in their serial number, but most PCs unfortunately don't). I know the auto generated number can be statistically reasonably unique, but sysadmins are lazy people. If they run into this problem, they'll take the knob with the on/off switch rather than the think about the problem and specify the full WWN; and then, being busy people, they'll forget about it as "problem solved". When they do this, statistically (and probably years later) there will be a cluster reboot where the entire SAN simply collapses and no-one knows why ... the poor SAN administrator will likely spend weeks working out the problem is.
Why, if we give lazy administrators root access, that's all they'll use, and they will just think "problem solved" until a serious security issue arises that takes down the cluster.
See how silly and un-Linux that logic is? In Linux, the admin has the power to make stupid decisions -- or to make informed decisions that disagree your rigid "an admin should never do that" line of thought. It's their hardware.
You're also using the 1% case of a 1% case of a 1% case to argue against a feature that is useful in making things Just Work(tm).
Jeff - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
