[ale] OS or Hardware issue?

[Steve Litt]

Jim Kinney said on Wed, 21 Apr 2021 07:26:05 -0400

>Ha! Nice device name. :-)
>
>It takes a bit to get used to but the name based on device tree
>attachment makes sense to me. It's easier now to see which nic is on
>the mobo and which is the add-in card. 

:-)

Jim, we usually don't agree on the new Freedesktop.org breed of
software, but in this case we do. On the Devuan mailing list I posted a
shellscript to turn en5pq42usuck441 into eth0 or whatever. This
shellscript can be used in any script-based process supervisor, such as
s6 or runit. For key/value style process managers like systemd or
Epoch, you could easily create environment variable ETH0, WLAN0, etc
very early in the boot, and use them in your key-value pairs.

The new network naming solves a real problem in a reasonable way. As a
little boy last century, the old pros who were able to grow a beard
warned me: "Never use two network cards of the same kind, or eth0 and
eth1 will switch indeterminately." I never had it happen
indeterminately, but several times had it happened after software
updates or hardware changes.

Now that I can grow a beard of my own, I appreciate the new naming
scheme. Yeah, it's complicated, but nothing a simple shellscript can't
straighten out, and I know I can always figure out what's what.

The same is true of substituting disk UUID for /dev/sd?. Yeah, it takes
a little more work, but I, and all my shellscripts, know what's what,
and run less of a risk of a shellscript formatting the wrong device.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques