NAME
ethers —
Ethernet host name data
base
DESCRIPTION
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.
FILES
- /etc/ethers
- The ethers file resides in
/etc.
SEE ALSO
ethers(3)
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.