device naming (mentioned in Fedora Weekly News 259)

[Roberto Ragusa]

On 01/21/2011 02:24 AM, Tim wrote:

> Interesting how someone, or some people, have seen the sense in making
> network device names more obvious as to what they refer to, rather than
> everything being generic eth0, etc.

Well, on the other end it is very useful if your NIC is called eth0,
because when it is not working well you can remove it from the slot,
plug in a new one and restart the system with no configuration change.

Try this today: it will not work, as you will have at least HW_ADDR
matching refusing to configure the new hardware by default.

Strong dependency on hw details (such as MAC address and HD serial numbers)
are very annoying any time you have to provide spare machines for
disaster recovery or create virtual machine images,...

I certainly agree that having just eth0, eth1 and eth2 with no indication
of which one is motherboard integrated and which ones are the two
jacks on the PCI board is not good. Then numbers dance around when
changing kernel or BIOS version. (really happened to me and can be
a bad problem if, for example, your private net NIC and internet
facing NIC get swapped).

Both approaches are needed, case by case.

If there is only one NIC, I want it to be eth0.
But I also like that some external disks appear with their own
device name and mountpoint (e.g. /dev/backupdisk0).

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it