Fedora 16 killed my eth0 ?

[Andrew Haley]

On 04/05/2012 08:10 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Andrew Haley wrote:
>> On 04/04/2012 06:47 AM, Zoltan Szecsei wrote:
>>> Well, perhaps someone should also think about impact of name-changing.
>>> Quite frankly, what's in a name, so why change it?
>>
>> 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.
>>
> You may think this is fixed, but in truth it is *broken*! Instead of 
> having a single predictable interface name you could put in a script 
> which would work on all typical user machines which have a single NIC, 
> or a hardware NIC called eth0 and the first wireless NIC called wlan0.

I take your point: that is a special case, albeit a very common one.

But your reply really does beg the question: what does "the first"
even mean in the context where there is more than one of anything?
All you can do is hope they won't change, or hard-wire some names.
This will be better once people get used to it.

> On top of that, the names are not in any way "fixed," it appears that 
> adding another eSTAT controller renamed my NIC, possibly because it 
> moved to another slot.
> 
>>>  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?
>>
> To what? If a program does "ifconfig eth0" where do I put a symlink to 
> make that return p57p3 results?

Sorry, yes.  Point taken: not a devnode.

Andrew.