A wish for network rules

A wish for network rules

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

Hello,

Now udev distribution includes the scripts that generate persistent 
numbered symlinks for network devices and rules for keeping the ethernet 
device order between reboots. There is, however, one problem with the 
script.

Suppose that I have a computer with two network cards at home. One of 
them faces a wired network spanning several homes, with the wire going 
from one roof to the other. In summer, this network card is likely to be 
damaged by lightning, together with the switch (yes, there are devices 
that protect against this, but bad things happen even with them). I want 
to be able to replace this network card easily.

With the current generator, which generates persistent rules based on 
MAC addresses, the following steps are needed:

 * Power off the computer
 * Remove the damaged network card (let's suppose it was "eth0"), put 
another cheap RTL-8139 clone instead of it
 * Turn the computer on. It will detect the new card and assign a name 
such as "eth2" to it
 * Edit the generated rules and replace "eth2" with "eth0". Remove the 
original rule about "eth0"
 * Reboot again

However, in this use case, location-based rules such as the following 
one (sorry, it is for old version of udev) are preferred to MAC-based ones:

SUBSYSTEM="net", BUS="pci", ID="0000:00:0c.0", NAME="eth0"

This way, one just has to:

 * Power the computer off
 * Remove the damaged network card (let's suppose it was "eth0"), insert 
a new one in the same PCI slot
 * Turn the computer on again.

No reconfiguration is needed, because the new card becomes "eth0".

I want the network rule generator to become configurable via a file in 
/etc/default or in /etc/udev and allow to choose the style of network 
rules among the two described ones.

Similarly, one may wish (for unknown-yet reason) to have identity-based 
(i.e., model + serial number) rules for numbered CD-ROM symlinks.

-- 
Alexander E. Patrakov

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