Re: Naming of network devices - how to improve it in buster

[Matt Zagrabelny <mzagrabe@d.umn.edu>]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> wrote:

Am 12.07.2017 um 17:35 schrieb Marc Haber:
> My finger memory will still type tcpdump -i eth0 before the brain can
> intervene ten years from now.

thankfully tcpdump (and lots of other tools) have nice shell completion.
tcpdump -i <TAB> works great her.

Agreed. However, I'd still rather deal with names like /dev/sda and eth0 than /dev/disk/by-id/ata-SanDisk_SSD_U100_252GB_122339300522 and en<blah>.

It is kind of like using people's first names as opposed to their Social Security Number (in US) or other form of national identification. I know when I can use the name Matt and I know who it refers to, even if another Matt enters the room. I'm comfortable with eth0 being the name, even when another interface appears.

I completely understand, and largely agree with, the need for persistent naming - but I think we are selling ourselves and our users short by not pressing harder for network interface aliases. It seems to be too useful of a solution for this problem.

-m