Good lord, this is a top tier meme!

I have no idea at all of what this is about but I feel strongly that OP is right and we must urgently fix this disgusting problem we are facing with the interfaces. Get em, OP, get the bastards. Solidarity

It's amazing how many linux problems stem from 'Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme'. Just about every over complex, bloated bit of nonsense we have to fight with has the same genesis.

I laughed so hard. Then I cried remembering good old days of eth0.

The predictable interface naming has solved a few issues at work, mainly in regards to when we have to work with expensive piece-of-shit (enterprise) systems, since they sometimes explode if your server changes interface names.
Normally wouldn't be an issue, but a bunch of our hardware - multiple vendors and all - initialize the onboard NIC pretty late, which causes them to switch position almost every other boot.

I've personally stopped caring about interface names nowadays though, I just use automation to shove NetworkManager onto the machine and use it to get a properly managed connection instead, so it can deal with all the stupid things that the hardware does.

Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme for assigning network interface names. It fails at solving the problem it was created to solve

I somehow first read "Redhat" as "Reddit" in this sentence, and so was briefly thinking that perhaps this bad idea originated there 😂

I actually prefer the eth0 and wlan0.

As someone who worked on a pre-systemd linux system with multiple NICs and needed them all configured automatically from an OS image based on where it was in the rack, I can't stress enough how good deterministic interface names are.

Booting up a system and each time having different names for each NIC was a nightmare.

Frankly 90+% of what systemd has done is tremendously positive and makes linux a better operating system to use, both for sys admins and end users.

"the order in which the system discovered it" is not deterministic

This is the same problem they had with hard drive names and it seems to have been solved in a sensible way, i.e. /dev/sda still points to the first disk detected by the system, but you can look look in /dev/disk/by-path (or by-uuid, etc) to see the physical address of the devices on the system and what they are symlinked back to, and set your fstab or mdadm arrays to be configured based on those unique identifiers instead.

So, I guess what I'd like to know is why hasn't this been solved the same way? When you boot up they should present every hard wired Ethernet port as ethX, and the hardware address interface should be present as well but aliased back to the eth. Then you can build the your network configs based on either one.

Shouldn't be that hard right?

eth0? No no, we need wlps0n1pn2d4es6vsd9c69420

I miss seeing this meme format on Lemmy. It's so good, and this one is no exception.

Here I am on a laptop with no ethernet ports (probably works over USB-C? No idea, haven't tried), and a single wifi adapter. Guess I'll give it a try:

ip link show

What I expected

wlan0

What I got

wlp242s0

Neat 👍 😎 👍

This is the goddamned truth

Kernel parameters? This is a udev thing, just change the udev rule.

To disable predictable interface naming and switch back to the old scheme, add net.ifnames=0 and biosdevname=0 to your boot paramets.

What is the old scheme? This?

The solution to this issue is to assign custom names based on MAC address. The MAC address is hardcoded into the network adaptor, and will not change. (There are other ways to do this as well, such as setting udev rules).

Does that mean that until you name something it's unusable?

Anti Commercial-AI license

Also, make sure your password contains L's, 1's, 0's and O's in a font deliberately chosen to make them hard to tell apart.

Thanks for this post. I've been working with Interfaces on Red Hat nodes this week and I've already wondered what the hell is going on there.

I really appreciate this change. Prior to it was always a struggle to deploy servers successfully. You'd reboot and your database would be on the wrong interface and you could even remote in because the management interface was suddenly on a firewalled external only network. Ask me how I know.

With virtualization and containers this just got more complicated. I would constantly have to rewrite kvm entire configs because I'd drop a new nic in the machine. A nightmare.

Sure, it's gibberish for the desktop user but you can just use the UI and ignore the internal name. Not even sure the last time I saw it on my laptop. So no big deal.

I had to change mine to mac address naming on my proxmox server after the second time the name changed due to a GPU or SSD being added. It was kind of like, so what, if an SSD dies suddenly or I have some issue with a device you are going to rename my fucking nic card again while I am trying to troubleshoot? Absolutely deranged.

Wait until you find out about vlans