NAME
ethers —
Ethernet host name data base
DESCRIPTION
Theethers 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-IPEthernet 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.
FILES
- /etc/ethers
- The
ethersfile resides in /etc.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
The ethers file format was adopted from
SunOS and appeared in NetBSD 1.0.
BUGS
A name server should be used instead of a static file.