On Wed, 12 Jul 2017, Michael Biebl wrote: > Am 12.07.2017 um 18:58 schrieb Matt Zagrabelny: > > On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 11:47 AM, Michael Biebl <bi...@debian.org > > <mailto:bi...@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. > > Indeed, the best solution would be to never rename the interfaces and > simply create aliases / symlinks. Then again, I'm no kernel hacker so I > have no idea if that would be feasible.
ip link set dev eth0 alias foo0 But don't expect everything to work right with this: it is the same mechanism that was used for adding "extra IP addresses" when using braindamaged crap from a decade ago (old ifconfig), so I very much bet there are going to be stuff misbehaving... The obvious thing would be to just tell the kernel to change namespaces in the first place (kconfig + command line), and have userspace aware of the kernel namespace using sysfs. Just beware the kernel default would be "unspecified" (and not "eth*", etc) because this is not central policy in the kernel at all). I have never understood why this wasn't done, since it is absolutely trivial to implement, even if it is a lot of busywork (you have to patch each !@#$ network driver). But you could clean up a _LOT_ of crap kernel side while at it, AND create both a central point for naming this stuff AND better device grouping, so it would be worth the trouble. And it would be opt-in, default N, and detectable from userspace, so that it would not regress anything not prepared for it. -- Henrique Holschuh
