Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty@???> writes:
> Having dealt with systems with half a dozen interfaces in the past there's
> a very small number of cases where it even matters, but when it does, it
> can be a huge inconvenience either way.

Namely, "it matters" because Dell boxes with more than one interface
usually come with a mulitport NIC and a 'randomly chosen' additional one
often/ usually requiring more than one driver. That's easy to deal with
for the people using these Dell boxes (compile the drivers into the
kernel) and certainly not a reason why anybody else should suffer.

> Their (for once, rational) argument is that Interface names of existing
> interfaces should never change by adding or removing hardware from the
> system,

Or, putting this to a real background: Suppose your old eth0 fails and
you put in a replacement, you then have to change everything over to
eth1 because you get a new name for that (instead of the much more
sensible idea that 'eth0' is the first interface found by the kernel)

> or as a result of hardware/software quirks (on some systems,
> interfaces are known to swap places on reboot, which is clearly not
> acceptable).

Have you considered using screws to fix them to their slots if they're
that jumpy?

There's no "hardware quirk" which causes PCI addresses to change[*] and the
'software quirk' is called udev.

[*] As far as I know.