A question on an internal email alias last week reminded me of a story I used to tell new university graduates joining Sun at the start of their career and undergraduate placement students (interns) who used to come to Sun for a year's work experience. The story, which explained how the names for the le0, be0 and hme0 Ethernet interface names were arrived at, was intended to illustrate to the students that Sun is a fun place and not full of stuffed shirts with no sense of humour.
Our early workstations used the AM7990 Local Area Network Controller for Ethernet (LANCE) chip. For this reason we named this 10Mbit/s LANCE Ethernet interface le0.
When we developed 100Mbit/s Ethernet chip our engineers came up with the codename Big MAC Ethernet, hence be0, because it was a bigger interface than LANCE Ethernet and MAC (Media Access Control) is the name given to the physical address of an interface.
Our next step in interface development was combined 100Mbit/s Ethernet and fast/wide SCSI on a single chip. If you pronounce fast/wide SCSI as "Fwies" and combine it with a Big MAC you get a Happy Meal - hence hme0.
Posted by Daniel Möller on May 29, 2007 at 01:15 PM BST #