From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stephen Hemminger Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL]: Alias names for network interfaces Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:38:45 -0800 Message-ID: <20091218093845.00d7e918@nehalam> References: <20091218020241.GA18168@lina.inka.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: , , , , , , , , To: Return-path: Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:57974 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753635AbZLRRkP (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:40:15 -0500 In-Reply-To: Sender: netfilter-devel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:49:15 +0530 wrote: > The installer solution involved renaming the network interface names > from ethN to something else based on the naming convention that the user > specified. For example, if the user chose "smbios names" as the the > naming convention then all ethN would be renamed to Embedded_NIC_N. > ifconfig would show Embedded_NIC_N instead of ethN. Renaming away from ethN causes some applications like net-snmp to get confused, and others have special sorting rules based on existing model (like quagga). I would argue that the "ethN" convention is part of existing system ABI and should not get changed in a visible way to applications. --