Rainer Weikusat <rweikusat@???> wrote:

>> All in all, the easiest way by far is to use stable and user(admin)
>> set names for interfaces !
>
> This is going to bite you in the posterior in case of canned OS
> installations intended to be usable on a wide range of differently
> configured 'servers' and not supposed to be maintained by anyhow
> 'UNIX(*)-savy' personnel, IOW, appliance-type installations. I need
> interface names which are stable, generally predictable (ie, if there
> are two interfaces they'll end up as eth0 and eth1), machine and
> NIC-independent and compatible with already existing software. The
> kernel naming scheme provides pretty much exactly what I
> need. Consequenstly, I'm determined to keep using it and software which
> gets in the way will be changed.

If you just use the default kernel naming scheme then you open yourself to the problem that udev was designed to solve - that of random device names. I do have personal experience of that - boot with a different disk (for maintenance) and eth0 & eth1 swap places (can't remember if it was "stable" when using just the main OS). And I've first hand experience of the "two disk controllers" problem where it really was random which disk was sda and which was sdb.
But once you go down the route of udev (or equivalent, eg vdev) and persistent rules, then "eth0" is just a subset of "admin set interface name".

I realise that in some cases, not using ethn will cause problems. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. BTW ot all my systems have named interfaces - many do just have eth0 and eth1. But on a system with (IIRC) 7 interfaces, I'll take human readable over my memory every time !

> The nice thing about free software is that one may use it to solve real
> problems the developers disapprove of.

Yes, that's a good one.