Bug#1050833: release-notes: Bookworm renames network interfaces
Package: release-notes
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
I did a test installation with a bullseye installer on a cubox-i
(armhf architecture) and then upgraded to bookworm. After the upgrade
the network was gone. Even booting with the previous kernel
5.10.0-23-armmp does not bring the network back.
After some more investigation, I found that the network interfaces got
renamed from eth0 to end0, which required manual modifications in my
/etc/network/interfaces file. Fortunately, I did this test before
upgrading production systems.
On one of my production systems the renaming also broke the packages
shorewall, dnsmasq, and some custom scripts.
On the debian-arm mailing list the topic was discussed in this threat:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2023/08/msg00003.html
Suggestions in the thread:
- Try adding "net.ifnames=0" to kernel's commandline.
- Adding a statement to the release notes like "did you know your
interface name will change after the reboot thus possibly breaking
your network configuration?"
- Add a warning to debconf which the user has to confirm during the upgrade
- ifupdown can do interface name wildcards and mac matching. The other solutions for this problem (systemd-networkd, NetworkManager,
ifupdown-ng, probably ifupdown2) -> but this solves only part of the problem, e.g. neither dnsmasq and shorewall are not covered nor custom scripts
Adding a prominent warning to the release notes should a low hanging fruit and would have helped me. Likely I would not have run in the issue in the first place or at least the debugging would have been easier :-)
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