't want to have to remember this hardware configurationan and I don't want to type these cumbersome and error prone names. I simply have eth0 for the internal network and eth1 for my external network to the DSL router. That's easy and I want to keep it that way. The Debian wiki on this shows several ways involving kernel cmdline, udev, and systemd. I've read it, I've also read some of the sparse and incomplete systemd documentation for almost an hour. Still I don't know when and what software component (kernel, udev, systemd) decides the NIC names and whether and in which way these conflict each other. [1] Also, after reading the wiki it's still unclear to me, which of the several ways will survive the next upgrade to bullseye. The safest way seems to be what's called "Custom schemes" but this section explicitly states the names eth0, etc. shouldn't be used. So I'm still confused what to do after the upgrade to buster to keep my network names. Steve
In my opinion explicit naming via systemd is the best:
#/etc/systemd/network/10-persistent-net.link [Match] MACAddress=01:23:45:67:89:ab [Link] Name=eth1
Put names and macs as you wish.