Why shows inxi -i the backbone of my provider?

[The]

I use my Banana Pi with pihole. There I see different IF-IDs.

 

1) What are IF-IDs? I assume Interface IDs. On my Laptop I don't see that. There are only IFs.

2) The speed of IF-ID-1 and -3 are 10000 Mbps. My Banana Pi M1 has only 100 Mbps. What is the sense of this?

3) The WAN IP of IF-ID-3 shows with whois that this is a Backbone of Vodafone. How could this be, that I see this?

 

inxi -i
Network:   Device-1: sun7i-a20-gmac driver: sun7i_dwmac 
           IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 02:cd:02:41:f1:17 
           IP v4: 192.168.178.5/24 type: dynamic noprefixroute scope: global 
           IP v6: fe80::a8fc:3ac5:236d:9a08/64 type: noprefixroute scope: link 
           Device-2: sun4i-a10-emac driver: N/A 
           IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 02:cd:02:41:f1:17 
           IP v4: 192.168.178.5/24 type: dynamic noprefixroute scope: global 
           IP v6: fe80::a8fc:3ac5:236d:9a08/64 type: noprefixroute scope: link 
           IF-ID-1: br-c5313994639f state: up speed: 10000 Mbps duplex: unknown 
           mac: 02:42:5e:a7:db:07 
           IP v4: 172.18.0.1/16 scope: global 
           IP v4: 169.254.26.87/16 type: noprefixroute scope: global 
           IP v6: fe80::dcd1:baf2:cbe0:ee55/64 scope: link 
           IF-ID-2: docker0 state: down mac: 02:42:b7:ad:fd:8e 
           IP v4: 172.17.0.1/16 scope: global 
           IF-ID-3: veth7c401b9 state: up speed: 10000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 82:f2:6e:c4:3a:5c 
           WAN IP: 178.11.164.65 

 

[h2-1]

1. IF-ID means that inxi was not able to match the IF to any specific Device, it's what is left over. The man page explains this, I believe.

 

2. The speed is what your system reported, inxi is just repeating it. If that is wrong, the issue lies elsewhere, but inxi is showing you that there may be an issue elsewhere if the data seems wrong. IF-iD-1,2 might be a sort of virtual networking internal to the system, and might actually be that fast, for example, a vm guest talking to its host could easily be that fast since it's not going over your actual NIC, but instead is internal to the OS, between kernel and hypervisor, just as an example. That has nothing to do with inxi, it's just repeating what it was told by the OS.

 

3. WAN IP is not related to the previous items, it is your WAN IP, as it says.

 

Some of these ambiguities were fixed in more recent inxis by creating a secondary indentation level to make which items belong to which more obvious. inxi can't do anything if the distro doesn't update the inxi in the pool, then users are stuck with the legacy version. I don't believe indentation updates would make the above much more clear because only items that belong on the same 'line' are indented a second level, new 'lines', like IF, IF-ID, WAN-IP, are not subject to this secondary indentation unless they are too long.

 

WAN means Wide Area Network, aka, the internet. LAN means Local Area Network, aka, your local  network. So whatever your WAN IP is, is what it is, and yes, it belongs usually to some ISP or other. 

 

IF-ID has never been the most clear thing, though it makes more sense once you understand what it refers to. it's just an Interface ID that can't be connected to the device logically, it exists, but inxi doesn't know what it belongs to. As noted, those are often things like vm networks, but they could be other things, docker, whatever. Often OS talking to itself or a vm of some type though, not the NIC.