Andrew Haley wrote (on 04-Apr-2012 at 09:55 +0100): ...
It's because in the old scheme when a machine had several ports the mapping between the physical hardware and the dev nodes was not fixed: the kernel would just assign names as it found interfaces. This caused a fair bit of inconvenience.
I applaud the wish to have consistent naming.
I wish to have a consistent name for a given MAC address, and I wish that to be eth0.
There is clearly a mechanism for this, since an upgrade (rather than a clean install) appears to do it. But it seems to be buried many layers deep in udev spells :-(
From my side, I have a "no longer supported" SW product that licenses itself against the MAC address of ETH0. Yep, ETH0 and not any other name.
Put a symlink in?
OK. Gizza clue: what would the symlink be, where would one insert it, and what effect would it have ? Would, for example, ifconfig or ip recognise the new name and show results using it ? Would one end up with two apparent "interfaces" ?
Thanks,
Chris