Hi, On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 02:52:38PM +0000, Chris Bell via GLLUG wrote: > I have a computer which I want to use as a replacement firewall-router. It > has > Debian Trixie installed, then a quad PCIe ethernet card was added. I > configured > /etc/network/interfaces.d but NetworkManager is recommended,
Recommended by whom for what purpose? N-M is installed by default on any Debian system with a desktop environment, but otherwise Debian makes no recommendation as to how to do your networking, and even when N-M *is* installed, it will only manage interfaces that are not managed by some other means. Popular choices on Debian would also include ifupdown, systemd-networkd and netplan (which itself uses either systemd-networkd or N-M). But as Debian doesn't make any recommendations there are people setting up all their networking with a sh script… As far as I see it, it is totally a matter of choice. For a Debian server/router/firewall that is not portable I would generally pick ifupdown or if that got too limited I'd go with systemd-networkd. > it wants to use UUID's, not MAC addresses. Use them for what? By UUID here do you mean the topology like enp1s0… etc? > Every suggestion so far shows the UUID of the motherboard ethernet but > not the NIC. Ethernet interfaces don't have a UUID. Do you mean its MAC, which is mean tto be unique? Even so I don't understand what "use the UUI/MAC but not the NIC" could mean. > Do I really need to re-install with the > card in place? To achieve what? What is the actual problem? If you are having issues with the naming of interfaces then I can suggest either disabling that (net.ifnames=0 on kernel command line and reboot) or using systemd .link files to pick your own names by MAC address. e.g.: $ cat /etc/systemd/network/10-lan0.link [Match] MACAddress=08:bf:b8:bf:0c:08 Type=ether [Link] Name=lan0 But I'm not confident that this is actually what you are talking about… Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting -- GLLUG mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug
