On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 08:30:33AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 09:17:00AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:However, I'll point out that machines with this many network interfaces are *by far* the exception rather than the rule; indeed, even machines with more than *one* interface each of wired and wireless are reasonably rare.In the home desktop space, perhaps. When you deal with rackmount servers, OTOH, four (wired) network ports is pretty standard these days. Of course, they're all on the same bus and using identical hardware/ firmware, so the "order might change based on which drivers load first" case still doesn't apply.To the best of my awareness, the rationale for calling this "predictable network interface names" is that, on a single computer which has multiple network interfaces of a given type, this naming scheme makes it possible to predict *from one boot to the next* what the name of each one will be. On such a computer, this is extremely valuable. By contrast, on a computer which has at most one interface of a given type, this naming scheme provides - so far as I can tell - no advantage at all. What's more, when working on *multiple* computers of that latter type, this naming scheme makes it impossible to predict *from one computer to the next* what the name of the sole available interface will be. As such, IMO this naming scheme makes network-interface names significantly *less* predictable in the real-world scenario which is most commonly encountered.This closely parallels the move from using /dev/sdXn to UUIDs for referring to filesystems. Probably superior in theory and doesn't cause any issues as long as you're dealing with a single machine and unchanging hardware configuration... but then you have a drive failure, restore your backups onto new hardware, and you're hosed because the system wants to boot from a UUID that no longer exists. (Yes, you can recover from that situation - I know because I've had to do it - but it doesn't Just Work(TM) effortlessly.)
I think you're right here and, in both cases, if you're not using more manageable names, then you're not using the system to its fullest.
You wouldn't refer to a host by it's IP address, or it's MAC address or it's Serial Number, you'd give it a name. So why not name your drives (and then use the by-label or LABEL= system) and why not name your interfaces (core-network0, core-network1, backup-lan, monitoring-lan - they don't HAVE to have numbers)
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