On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 02:15:53PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> 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?

I remember having this problem some years ago with some upgrade (I no longer
know which one). It may not have been ascii -> beowulf. And it may have been
an earlier Debian upgrade.

In the past when eth0 and eth1 got misassigned I had fixed things by swapping
the cables on the back of the machine. Since in those days things were
consistend from boot to boot, it took care of the problem.

However, this time things were no longer so consistent.

I had to solve it by assigning new names to the interfaces (thus not eth0 or
eth1) and modifying all the config files mentioning those interface names (I
found them with grep) to use the new names instead.

Apparently the eth0 file names were allocated a a low-level in the kernel and
the kernel did not take kindly to having them changed.

It should have been easier.

Unfortunately I can no longer find the files where I did this.

If you have ideas where I could look, I can try to figure out what I did.

I wish everything user-configurable under /etc was under revision control.
then we might even be able to have a vendor branch and a local branch.

-- hendrik

>
> 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.
>
> --
> Numerous psychological studies over the years have demonstrated that the
> majority of people genuinely believe they are not like the majority of people.
>

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