January 28, 2011
Fedora 15 Changing The Network Device Naming Scheme

Fedora 15 Changing The Network Device Naming Scheme

The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, a sort of race condition develops at every system boot and the ports may get their names in an arbitrary order. Suppose we have two Ethernet devices - eth0 and eth1. It cannot be ensured that eth0 will remain as eth0 and eth1 will remain as eth1 after the next system boot. The names will be allocated arbitrarily. This is generally not a problem in personal computers because there is only one port. However, some servers have multiple Ethernet ports and this naming scheme creates problems in such cases.

Makes sense, but not sure I like it. Kudos to OSNews for the original link.

The big question is will other distros adopt this as well.





Posted by Arcterex at January 28, 2011 01:18 PM