Quoting Renaud OLGIATI (renaud@???):

> On Sun, 20 Aug 2017 21:30:00 -0700 Rick Moen <rick@???>
> wrote:
>
> > However_, even given that, in my experience any reshuffle USB would
> > add to the _existing_ devices' node assignments would occur only at
> > reboot time _if_ you left the USB device plugged in.
>
> Personal experience: I run an IPCop box as a firewall for my LAN,
> using three USBtoRJ45 interfaces in an attempt to reduce the
> motherboard damage from thunderstorms (I live in Darkest Paraguay).
>
> The local electricity system is not all that reliable, and even with a
> UPS the box gets rebooted several times a week.
>
> In around ten years of use I have never had the problem of USB/NIC
> assignment changing at reboot, except when I had to replace a
> burnt-out USBtoRJ45 ;-3(

Interesting and thank you. At first, I thought you were going to post
Yet Another USB Flakiness Story, but it turns out that your NICs have
_not_ self-reassigned. Good to know.

FWIW, when I wrote the above, I actually had in mind mass storage, e.g.,
a system has /dev/sda on one HBA and /dev/sdb on another, mounts a USB
mass storage device as /dev/sdc, and then reboots with the USB mass
storage device plugged in and now finds that the USB device is /dev/sdb
in-between the two persistent devices with the result that /etc/fstab is
wrong. (Probably, the admin curses a blue streak and switches to UUID
referencing or disk labels.)

One thing that people definitely _do_ bitch about is USB casual storage
being (say) /dev/sdc upon one insertion and then later /dev/sdd at the
next insertin (without a reboot between). From my perspective, I never
saw this as a problem. You just observe the inserted device's node by
looking at dmesg | tail, su to root, mount device, done. But the
new-user people don't like that, and want the process to be automagic.
Greg Kroah-Hartman justified the whole udev thing to me, claiming it
needed to be on all Linux systems, on grounds that he wanted his
daughter to be able to use USB devices without needing to be root. I
replied that happily he could do anything for his daughter he wished on
his _own_ systems, but that his daughter wouldn't be plugging USB
devices into my servers, so I wasn't especially interested in helping
her there.