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ETHERS(5)                 NetBSD File Formats Manual                 ETHERS(5)


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.

NetBSD 5.0.2                   November 7, 2000                   NetBSD 5.0.2