Proposed F19 Feature: systemd/udev Predictable Network Interface Names

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 07:59:07PM +0000, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> The udevd service has a long history of providing predicatable names for
> block devices and others. For Fedora 19 we'd like to provide the same for
> network interfaces, following a similar naming scheme, but only as
> fallback if not other solution such as biosdevname is installed or the
> administrator manually defined network interface names via udev rules or
> the old network scripts.
[...]
> This feature is about enabling this as default in Fedora, but only as a 
> fallback if the user/administrator did not manually assign names to interfaces 
> via udev rules, or via the old networking scripts, or if biosdevname is 
> installed.

This seems to invent yet another new naming scheme. We just went through
this pain, and the biosdevname scheme went through several iterations in the
field and represents real-world lessons learned. Is there a compelling
reason to make the systemd/udev policy for Fedora not just follow the
existing solution to the same problem embodied in biosdevname? (Then, we
could just phase out biosdevname.)


Also, I strongly question this line in the Feature page:

  "Users generally won't see this, as interface names are not exposed in
   high-level UIs."

This is simply not true for many values of the word "user" which we support
in Fedora, which runs right into the drawback mentioned in the upstream
documentation:

   Does this have any drawbacks? Yes, it does. Previously it was practically
   guaranteed that hosts equipped with a single ethernet card only had a
   single "eth0" interface. With this new scheme in place, an administrator
   now has to check first what the local interface name is before he can
   invoke commands on it where previously he had a good chance that "eth0"
   was the right name.

That's pretty big.

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>