Hi.

I've just installed a couple of Beowulf systems, each of which has three
ethernet interfaces; one on the motherboard, and two on a PCI card.

I'm trying to work out how to give those interfaces the names I want; the
motherboard as eth0, and the PCI card as eth1 / eth2.

Historically, I've been used to udev and /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-
net.rules doing this, where I can specify the name I want for each interface
according to its MAC address.

The file didn't exist (although the directory did) on my Beowulf system, so I
created one with the appropriate contents, and I now get messages while the
kernel is booting:

udevd[441]: Error changing net interface name eth2 to eth0: File exists
udevd[441]: could not rename interface '4' from 'eth2' to 'eth0': File exists
udevd[438]: Error changing net interface name eth1 to eth2: File exists
udevd[438]: could not rename interface '3' from 'eth1' to 'eth2': File exists
udevd[445]: Error changing net interface name eth0 to eth1: File exists
udevd[445]: could not rename interface '2' from 'eth0' to 'eth1': File exists

I've followed the entire thread on this list from July 2018 about this, which
I've found _some_ of in the archives at
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20180715.200323.7a2473a2.en.html however
that link shows only a very small proportion of the emails in the discussion
for some reason (I have my own local copy in my mail client).

According to https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkInterfaceNames the old 70-
persistent-net.rules system _should_ still work in Buster / Beowulf, but I
can't work out how to get it to do so.

I _have_ tried adding "net.ifnames=0" to the kernel boot line; this makes no
difference.

So:

1. how can I get 70-persistent-net.rules to carry on working under Beowulf?

2. what's the "correct" way to get my interfaces named the way I want,
according to their MAC addresses, under Beowulf?

(The above Debian wiki document indicates that Buster is the last release
which will continue to support this, so I'm assuming I'll need to do something
else for Chimaera; what is it?)


Thanks,


Antony.

--
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