On 03/14/2017 09:16 AM, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Tue, 14 Mar 2017 17:01:04 +0100
poma wrote:
> Yeah, the emphasis is on consistency of names of network interfaces.
And the consistent names change every single time some
developer decides he just has to rewrite the algorithm
to make it better, or systemd decides to engluph yet
another component and not be backward compatible, or
a kernel developer gets a new motherboard where the
scheme doesn't work and his fix has the side effect
of changing the names on thousands of existing systems, etc.
There have been at least 3 different "immutable" name
schemes in the short time the whole concept has existed.
I finally decided to eradicate it and go back to eth0
and friends because it was infinitely more reliable than
having to discover yet another naming scheme in every damn
release.
Now my only problem will be that they'll probably keep changing
the name of the kernel option to disable it :-).
It is quite difficult to come up with an immutable name that would be
consistent with every hardware configuration possible. Ubuntu's concept
of using the MAC address is fine...until you use multiple NICs in a
bond where the MAC address of the first NIC is cloned onto the slaves
to simplify ARP and such (or other such MAC-cloning scenarios).
Fedora's idea of bus/slot/device[/subunit] is fine as well...until the
bus scan changes due to the addition of a new device into the bus.
There was a time where running a kernel on a Dell 2950 (4U) box would
enumerate the motherboard NICs first, followed by any in the external
PCI bus. Running the SAME kernel on a Dell 1950 (2U) box would enumerate
the external PCI bus NICs first, then the motherboard NICs. Damned
frustrating!
Back in the day, Sun used the MAC address of the NIC as the unique
system identifier for a machine. If the NIC ever had to be replaced
(which happened fairly often), then all of your software licenses were
invalidated as they were tied to that MAC address. Grrrr!
Like I said, it's damned difficult to come up with something. If you
have a better idea, then submit it to the various kernel groups. This
is an issue that's been plaguing them for a long time. In the interim,
come up with your own udev rules and swap them around from distro to
distro. That's the beauty of Linux...you can tweak it to match what you
want--up to a point (oh, I'd love to go off on systemd again...).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks(a)alldigital.com -
- AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 226437340 Yahoo: origrps2 -
- -
- Fear is finding a ".vbs" script in your Inbox -
----------------------------------------------------------------------