[pve-devel] [PATCH manager/widget-toolkit 0/2] show altenative interface names in the web ui

[Thomas Lamprecht]

Am 14.07.25 um 15:53 schrieb Dominik Csapak:
> On 7/14/25 15:49, Christoph Heiss wrote:
>> Tested the series, came across two thing:
>>
>> Given e.g. the following interface:
>>
>>      11: ens8: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc [..]
>> 	link/ether 01:02:03:04:05:06 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
>> 	altname nic8
>> 	altname enxdeadff02d073
>>
>> and the following /etc/network/interfaces snippet:
>>
>>      auto nic8
>>      iface nic8 inet manual
>>
>> the interface will be displayed twice in the network page. If in the
>> above snippet s/nic8/ens8/ is done (i.e. using the primary name), it
>> works correctly.
>>
>> I guess between our /e/n/i parser and the altname mapping the interface
>> is picked up twice, so this will need some sort of "de-duplication" in
>> the backend, from what I can gather.
> 
> yeah i don't touch the which interfaces will be shown, so
> that's on the /e/n/i parser

Fwiw, it's not really wrong, one is the name in /e/n/i and the others
are interface names per `ip link`, but it naturally can be a bit
confusing as is.

Depends also a bit on what we want, i.e., it probably makes sense to always
show the name used in the /e/n/i config in the name column, and always filter
that out from the alternative names displayed, as that allows the easiest
correlation to the /e/n/i config, which is the main source of true for this
panel.
The small downside for that is then that the Alternative Names column is not
a 1:1 mapping of what `ip link` shows as altname, but that probably is not
an actual issue, after all they all live in the same namespace and are
interchangeable for usage with the iproute2 tools.
But that might also mean that we have to treat duplicates explicitly here
in the API call enhancing that info. Waiting until tomorrow makes sense in
any way though, as Stefan will be back from his short vacation then and 
might have some input here.