Request: Optional "Comment" [Peer] entry

[Antonio Quartulli]

On 17/11/17 17:20, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> Hi Lonnie,
> 
> Quite a few people have requested this, and I've implemented it, but
> never had the motivation to merge it. I keep hesitating between
> thinking that it's a reasonable thing to want, and thinking that it's
> not appropriate to have in a low level tool, and that whatever
> configuration management apparatus you're using should handle it
> instead. Usually I just defer thinking about it until later, but given
> it's come up again, I probably should revisit the issue. There is some
> precedent for this kind of thing: net devices have ifalias and
> iptables has the comment target. However, routes in the routing table
> don't have comments, and neither do IP address assignments on
> interfaces (unless you're counting rDNS). So, hm. I'll think about it.

Just an idea from another kernel module:

in batman-adv (a Layer2 routing protocol implemented in kernelspace)
there was a similar problem: people wanted to give names to peers rather
than using their (almost impossible to remember) MAC-addresses.

Given that batman-adv also comes with its own userspace tools, namely
batctl, the latter has been extended with a name-conversion functionality.
It basically relies on a file called /etc/bat-hosts the same way as most
linux commands rely on /etc/hosts when printing an hostnames/IPs to screen.

The difference is that bat-hosts contains a MAC-addresses instead of IPs
- being batman-adv a L2 protocol.

How it works: whenever batctl has to print a peer ID to screen, it will
first search the bat-hosts file for a matching entry and then, if one is
found, the related name is printed. The MAC-address is printed otherwise.

Couldn't wg do something similar? Maybe using some kind of
*/etc/wg-name* file containing a mapping from peer-key to
peer-name/comment? Or even by re-using the original configuration file
(with a new Comment/Name field).

This way the logic would all reside in the userspace tool without
touching the kernel module at all.

The same name conversion applies also for 'input' commands. I.e. you
could tell batctl to "ping" a name and it would first convert it to a
MAC address and then pass it down to the kernel module. Not sure if this
can happen to wg as well.


just my 2 cents.

Cheers,


> 
> Jason
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-- 
Antonio Quartulli

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