Historical question

From: Zeljko Vrba (mo.dor_at_fly.srk.fer.hr)
Date: 06/21/05 

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 06:21:45 +0000 (UTC)

I'm wondering just out of curiosity.. Why was it decided that NICs don't have
an entry in /dev but to be configurable by ifconfig?

And why don't all sockets (irrespective of domain) have some kind of a vnode
in a (synthetic) filesystem? It would be great for debugging sometimes just
to be able to inject data to socket by doing something like
cat smth > /sockets/ipv4/... It doesn't even work for UNIX sockets which DO
have a file-system inode..

Another use would be for sniffing traffic by doing cat on the socket. Without
such facility we need specialized tools like tcpdump.

I'm not proposing an implementation. Just asking for the historical reason
for this unorthogonality.