Re: Need current Debian _specific_ HOWTO for vnstat
On Sun, Oct 19, 2025 at 18:31:38 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 19, 2025 at 06:43:31PM +0300, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:
> > From the
> > information he has provided to me off-list, it is indeed the case that
> > the ethernet-over-USB device in question (essentially a 4G router I
> > believe) IS changing MACs on each power cycle, so the names are not
> > predictable, without some sort of udev configuration or other tricks.
If this is all true (in which case, WHY didn't he just post that
information to the mailing list??), then the obvious solution is to
provide configuration which assigns an unchanging name to the
interface.
systemd.link(5) describes how to do this, but obviously it requires that
you provide a way to identify which interface's name you want to change.
Normally, one would match the MAC address in order to assign the name,
but in this case, that's not an option. So, I would suggest reading
that man page and looking at all of the other options, to see which one(s)
might be viable here.
The PermanentMACAddress= option looks quite interesting. I'm not sure
how you would determine whether the device in question has such an
address, or what it is.
As is often the case, gathering *as much information as you can* and
then showing it all to us would be an extremely helpful step. Look
at the output of dmesg (or the logged version of same, either in
/var/log/kern.log* or in journalctl), and copy *everything* you see
that pertains to the network interface. Look for commands that can
give additional information about the interface, such as mii-tool or
ethtool or dmidecode ... I'm not an expert on this stuff, so a few
web searches may give you more tools to try.
(You may have to INSTALL some of these tools. Try to use your noggin.
If a command that you try gives you "command not found", see whether
there's a package of the same name that you can install. Don't make us
spoon-feed you every... single... step. You're an adult. Act like one.)
Reply to: