[NTLUG:Discuss] Anyone experiencing NIC renaming issues

[Leroy Tennison]

Twice recently I have had this happen.  Apparently it is due to changes 
in philosophy in systemd/udev (see 
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/).

First it happened on Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS running 'apt-get upgrade' and 
the udev version changed to 204 with the result that six of the ten 
interface names changed. /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules was 
ignored.  The "final solution" was to add 'net.ifnames=1' (don't believe 
***any*** of the proposed solutions in the above URL: been there, done 
that, didn't work) and 'biosdevname=0' to the kernal command line while 
keeping /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (which defined the 
desired naming).  Dell wrote biosdevname as a helper to define interface 
names based on querying firmware.

The second happened upgrading openSuSE 12.3 on a VM to 13.1 (their 
'evergreen' version receiving longer term support).  Since it was only 
one NIC I just created the new ifcfg file and recreated the routes file 
with the appropriate interface name.

Anybody know how to give these folks feedback?  First, I consider 
changing six of ten interface names to be a bug.  Second, I question 
whether they have thought about the situation where consistent interface 
names need to be maintained across devices (the ten interface situation 
is a firewall where I'm replicating the configuration to a significantly 
newer purchase of the "same" hardware.  Wonder how likely it is that 
biosdevname will give the same names to the ten interfaces on the 
different platforms...).