This page documents the current interface naming convention used for 1.2, and looks at some issues and possible solutions to try to make this easier for a customer to understand without reading documentation to learn how ports are defined.
How ports are named in Version 1.2
The old Version 1.1 port names, while a bit more intuitive, had major problems. The diagram below shows a small setup with a gateway, a switch, and a controller/switch:
Note: With the exception
of the gateway ports all other ports are viewed from the controller.
Gateway: In the gateway the port names are easy to understand.
Ports are named (slot-port-channel). For example the Ethernet
in slot 3 is named eth-s3p1c0, and the ATM link is
atm-s1p1c0
Controller: Things get a bit more complicated in the controller. To best understand the port names you must place the point of reference at the controller. GSMP ports look just like IFMP ports, but are never configured. In our example above the following interfaces exist in the controller
Things get more complicated with switch ports added