Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

proposal: net: add the "Description" field for interfaces on Windows hosts #61039

Open
eoinmiller opened this issue Jun 27, 2023 · 4 comments
Open

proposal: net: add the "Description" field for interfaces on Windows hosts #61039

eoinmiller opened this issue Jun 27, 2023 · 4 comments
Labels
OS-Windows Proposal
Milestone
Proposal

Comments

@eoinmiller
Copy link

This proposal modifies Go to add the "Description" field for interfaces on Windows hosts.

The "Description" field, rather than "FriendlyName", is used by Windows Performance Monitor and others when identifying interfaces. Making both fields accessible makes correlating back to specific interfaces easier. New to this, apologies if I am not following along to the process very well!

Reference - IP_ADAPTER_ADDRESSES_LH structure (iptypes.h):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/iptypes/ns-iptypes-ip_adapter_addresses_lh

For #61033
@gopherbot gopherbot added this to the Proposal milestone Jun 27, 2023
@ianlancetaylor
Copy link
Contributor

What are examples of the contents of both fields on a Windows system? Thanks.

@ianlancetaylor
Copy link
Contributor

CC @golang/windows

@eoinmiller
Copy link
Author

eoinmiller commented Jun 27, 2023 •
edited

Example values:

Name         : Ethernet0
Description  : Intel(R) 82574L Gigabit Network Connection

Name         : Loopback Pseudo-Interface 1
Description  : Software Loopback Interface 1

Description field is shown via tools such as ipconfig as well:

>ipconfig /all
...
Ethernet adapter Ethernet0:
...
   Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Intel(R) 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
...

When attempting to attribute interface information back to other sources, such as windows performance monitors, the names are closer to "Description" (Description) rather than "Name" (FriendlyName).

image

@alexbrainman
Copy link
Member

@eoinmiller

We already have "Interface.Name". Adding "Interface.Description" would just add confusion between the two.

What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Thank you.

Also adding @bradfitz because he is an expert in Windows networking.

Alex

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Assignees
No one assigned
Labels
OS-Windows Proposal
Projects
Proposals
Status: Incoming
Milestone
Proposal
Development

No branches or pull requests
4 participants
@eoinmiller @ianlancetaylor @gopherbot @alexbrainman