Project Brussels Questionnaire

 Help us customize Brussels to provide the administrative knobs that you would like to see!

For more information on Brussels click here.

 In addition to the command-line interface, we are planning to implement a GUI-based tool to administer these properties.

We would like to come up with a user-friendly solution that targets the system administrator's needs. Thus we are seeking feedback from you. We appreciate any input you might provide, including answers to the questions in the following section. Please send your replies and any feedback to Brussels mailing list.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Questions

1. Please provide a one-line or two-line overview of your networking environment.
2. Do you frequently change or upgrade your network interface cards?
3. Do you modify existing NIC configuration or adjust the tunables? If yes, how frequently do you perform these tasks?
4. What tools or commands do you use to administer NICs? Are you satisfied with the existing tools?
5. What do you like about the current methods to administer NICs?
   Please be as specific as possible.
6. What do you dislike about the current methods to administer NICs?
   Please be as specific as possible.
7. What are the typical NIC tunables or properties that you monitor most of the time?
   Please indicate whether you merely obtain (read-only information) the current settings of a property, or you tune the current settings (read-write information).
8. Do you have scripts that run at boot time which set ndd parameters?
9. Do you write custom drivers? If yes, please provide any feedback about the following proposal by the Brussels project:
   The Brussels project aims to provide a simpler and cleaner interface for GLDv3 drivers by using the dladm command. When GLDv3 drivers register with the GLDv3 framework, these drivers drivers will provide function pointers for setting() and getting() properties. Subsequently, the dladm command can be used to send the appropriate system calls to trigger the registered set() and get() functions.
10. Do you use Link Aggregation (“Trunking”)?
11. Do you use WiFi?
12. Have you used the dladm as a configuration tool, such as dladm set-linkprop?
    If yes, what do you like and dislike about this interface?
13. Are you interested in a GUI-based version of the dladm command?
    If yes, what features would you like to be included in the GUI-based version?
14. Should the GUI-based tool be capable of tweaking all of the available NIC properties?
    If no, what selected properties should be configurable by the GUI-based tool, while the rest by a command line syntax?
15. To configure the MTU property, would you prefer to select from a list of set values that is provided by the GUI, or would you prefer typing the value in an input field?
    If you favor selecting from a list of given values, what MTU values do you suggest in addition to 1500 (for default) and 9000 (for jumbo frames support)?