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Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfi

Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfig.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
AceJohnny2 5y ago
In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. On some systems, plugging a dongle, or changing what port a USB hub was plugged in, could reorder/rename the ethernet ports and now your config for `eth2` was suddently being applied to a completely different interface. So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...) But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Yeah, I wish more Linux versions made that easier to do - I find it much easier to remember eth0 and eth1 vs the low level name, though the stability is nice.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Does your shell not tab-complete interfaces? Mine does, and is smart enough not to suggest up interfaces for `ifup` (so if I have a machine with a 10G card and a 1G onboard I make sure to keep the 1G interface disabled), but I don't know if that's one of my army of zsh plugins. For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    If using something like netplan it’s easy to associate a memorable name with a MAC address.
- cesarb 5y ago
  > In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. In the even older days, before the Linux kernel started probing hardware in parallel to speed up the boot process, this wouldn't vary depending on timing; for a given kernel version, the order would always be the same. Of course, the order could change when you updated your kernel, either because it had a new driver which was probed earlier, or because the probing order for the PCI bus changed to the opposite order (IIRC, that actually did happen). And of course, having the network drivers as kernel modules makes it much harder to preserve a deterministic probing order; but back in these days, it was much more common to carefully customize each machine's kernel to have as built-in drivers precisely the set corresponding to the hardware present on a given machine or fleet of machines, carrying that customization over for each new kernel release ("make oldconfig"); kernel modules would be relegated to things like filesystems which you might need only once in a while, and they would be unloaded when no longer in use (memory was precious).

Yeah what's the deal with this? I turn on "rename ports" in raspi-config immediately when I configure a new ones. I'm not trying to see that nonsense in ifconfig.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

AceJohnny2 5y ago

In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. On some systems, plugging a dongle, or changing what port a USB hub was plugged in, could reorder/rename the ethernet ports and now your config for `eth2` was suddently being applied to a completely different interface. So they switched to names that depended on stable interface metadata (ethernet vs wifi, pci port...) But people still want easier to remember device names, so it's still possible to rename your weird (but stable) port name to something more memorable.

bombcar 5y ago
Yeah, I wish more Linux versions made that easier to do - I find it much easier to remember eth0 and eth1 vs the low level name, though the stability is nice.
- eropple 5y ago
  Does your shell not tab-complete interfaces? Mine does, and is smart enough not to suggest up interfaces for `ifup` (so if I have a machine with a 10G card and a 1G onboard I make sure to keep the 1G interface disabled), but I don't know if that's one of my army of zsh plugins. For me, it tends to be that only one interface of each type is ever live at a time, so I don't really even see it except as line noise 'til I have to care about it.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  If using something like netplan it’s easy to associate a memorable name with a MAC address.
cesarb 5y ago
> In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. In the even older days, before the Linux kernel started probing hardware in parallel to speed up the boot process, this wouldn't vary depending on timing; for a given kernel version, the order would always be the same. Of course, the order could change when you updated your kernel, either because it had a new driver which was probed earlier, or because the probing order for the PCI bus changed to the opposite order (IIRC, that actually did happen). And of course, having the network drivers as kernel modules makes it much harder to preserve a deterministic probing order; but back in these days, it was much more common to carefully customize each machine's kernel to have as built-in drivers precisely the set corresponding to the hardware present on a given machine or fleet of machines, carrying that customization over for each new kernel release ("make oldconfig"); kernel modules would be relegated to things like filesystems which you might need only once in a while, and they would be unloaded when no longer in use (memory was precious).