On Monday 25 October 2021 at 11:37:47, Haines Brown wrote:

> With Beowulf, udev gave my wireless interface the name of a MAC
> address rather than wlan0. I thought the renaming would appear again
> with Chimaera, but not so. The wireless interface named wlan0. The
> ethernet interface remains eth0 although I expected it to be given
> its MAC address as well.
>
> My question, though, is a third interface that shows up and is not being
> used.
>
> enxf8e43b46877cc flags=4099<UP,BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
> ...
>
> The only devices are the motherboard ethernet and wireless chips.
> What is this interface?

That name looks very much like "enxf" followed by a MAC address
8e:43:b4:68:77:cc to me.

The OUI 8e:43:b4 does not correspond to any registered manufacturer, and the
hex digit e indicates that it is a locally-administered (ie: unregistered)
unicast address (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
#Ranges_of_group_and_locally_administered_addresses for detail).

So, my suspicion is that this does not correspond to any hardware device on
your machine, but is some virtual interface created by the kernel, perhaps for
a VPN, virtualisation support, or something like that.

Suggestions:

1. Have a look at your loaded modules (lsmod) and see if anything sticks out
as being "something to do with networking, but you didn't expect to have"

2. See whether the packet & byte counters for this interface ever go above
zero, and try to work out what the machine was doing at the time to cause
that.

3. Reboot and see whether the name stays the same - the prefix 8e:43:b4 might
stick, but if the suffix 68:77:cc changes between reboots this is a guarantee
that you're dealing with a pseudo / virtual device for some reason.

Let us know if you find out for sure what it is :)


Antony.

--
I thought of going into banking, until I lost interest.

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