[rrd-users] Re: Weird field name

[Alex van den Bogaerdt]

Philip Molter wrote:

> I agree.  Imagine my surprise when I found that you could create a DS
> with invalid characters and you could update a DS with invalid
> characters and you could even fetch data from a DS with invalid
> characters, but you couldn't pass the DS as arguments to graph.

<g> One would indeed expect that this is checked by one function,
not by many different functions/lines/whatever.

> Why is the limitation in there anyway?

There's always a limit.  Some may be more obvious than others.
For instance, you can't use double byte characters, you can't
use the null character etcetera.

Having a limited set of characters (and of course proper checking
of them) should make it less vulnerable to errors.  For instance,
if you were allowed to use 0x00 as a part of your DS name, it will
be hard to code...

Perhaps, somewhere in the future, there will be an extension to
RRDtool that allows for constructs like "myds-router" where
"myds" and "router" are separate DSes.  If the name "myds-router"
would be allowed, you'd have a problem.  I'm not saying that such
an extension should be implemented (I think it shouldn't) but it
doesn't hurt to much to start with a restricted set of characters
in the first place.

cheers,
-- 
   __________________________________________________________________
 / alex at slot.hollandcasino.nl                  alex at ergens.op.het.net \
| work                                                         private |
| My employer is capable of speaking therefore I speak only for myself |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Technical questions sent directly to me will be nuked. Use the list. | 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| http://faq.mrtg.org/                                                 |
| http://rrdtool.eu.org  --> tutorial                                  |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

--
Unsubscribe mailto:rrd-users-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=unsubscribe
Help        mailto:rrd-users-request at list.ee.ethz.ch?subject=help
Archive     http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/rrd-users
WebAdmin    http://www.ee.ethz.ch/~slist/lsg2.cgi