Bug#414287: eth0 to eth0_rename_ren
 

I just had to change my motherboard and when I did I lost eth0 and it
was called eth0_rename with no networking. I manually changed everything
in /etc/network/interfaces from eth0 to eth0_rename along with
firewall/routing/blah blah settings.


This morning I booted up and guess what? The same problem, only this
time I had to change eth0_rename to eth0_rename_ren in all my files and
settings. What gives? Why doesn't Linux just call it eth0, it's not
rocket science!


This is on Debian 5.0.




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Bug#414287: eth0 to eth0_rename_ren
 

On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 09:06 +0000, Nigel Horne wrote:
> I just had to change my motherboard and when I did I lost eth0 and it
> was called eth0_rename with no networking. I manually changed everything
> in /etc/network/interfaces from eth0 to eth0_rename along with
> firewall/routing/blah blah settings.
>
> This morning I booted up and guess what? The same problem, only this
> time I had to change eth0_rename to eth0_rename_ren in all my files and
> settings. What gives? Why doesn't Linux just call it eth0, it's not
> rocket science!

Ethernet interfaces are initially named eth0, eth1, etc. as they are
detected by drivers. The order in which they are detected and numbered
may vary between boots and particularly if you install, remove or
relocate expansion cards.

If you have udev installed (you probably do) it will record the name of
each new physical interface (identified by MAC address) in
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. On subsequent boots these
rules ensure that interfaces get the same name again. However,
sometimes the rules may be written wrongly such that two interfaces are
supposed to be given the same name (eth0 in this case). In this case
udev will give up and one of them will be left with the "_rename"
suffix. You will need to edit this file to fix it.

Ben.