Special values for network.host: bogus documentation, confusing error messages

[jelmd]

The (documentation)[https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-network.html#network-interface-values] is really confusing wrt. _[networkInterface]_. If e.g.
one uses network.publish_host: _[ hellas1 ]_ one gets strange error messages like

org.elasticsearch.transport.BindTransportException: Failed to resolve publish address
...
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No interface named '[name:hellas1 (hellas1)]' found, got [name:lo (lo), name:hellas0 (hellas0), name:hellas1 (hellas1)]
...
org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.StartupException: BindTransportException[Failed to resolve publish address]; nested: IllegalArgumentException[No interface named '[name:hellas1 (hellas1)]' found, got [name:lo (lo), name:hellas0 (hellas0), name:hellas1 (hellas1)]];

And now the casual user wonders: What the heck do they expect wrt. NIC name[s] for the network.publish_host argument? _[ name:hellas1 (hellas1) ]_?

[DaveCTurner]

It's tricky to think how else to represent this option in the docs; if we just said _networkInterface_ then it seems just as likely that someone would write literally that and encounter the same error. IMO the best we can do is show an example, as we do today:

_[networkInterface]_
. Addresses of a network interface, for example _en0_.

In your case your interface is called hellas1 so, extrapolating from this example, you should write network.host: _hellas1_.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-distributed (Team:Distributed)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-docs (Team:Docs)

[jelmd]

Hmmm, but I do not see any _[ ]_ in your suggestion. You suggest to just prefix + suffix the NIC name with an underline and use that one - that's not, what the documentation says. Also the documented example does not align with _[networkInterface]_ at all! [_networkInterface_] would and in the Unix world [ _networkInterface_ ... ] would describe it even better, if one adds a note, that `[]_' are literals ...