Network Card Naming Issue

[Les Mikesell]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> 
> Actually, no. The method is to use UUID and totally ignore hardware 
> names. That's what current /etc/fstab and /etc/mdadm.conf do these days.
> 
>> Right now, the key hardware components are remembered by udev.  As 
>> this new method matures, it will become easier to maintain/remove 
>> hardware.  But think of the alternative!  The old way might be ok for 
>> single drive, single interface systems, but not otherwise.
>>
>> There are many of us who remember the 'bad old days' when this issue 
>> was capable of destroying months of work!
>>
> The hal stuff was written by people who were wedded to matching the same 
> device to the same name. Putting MAC address, UUID, or serial number in 
> as the key is far more reliable, and allows people to to have a single 
> place to specify the match. Having to beat up sysconfig and hal to 
> change a failed device is not conducive to good system administration.
> 
> Your points are well taken, but I consider hal keeping it's own ideas 
> instead of using sysconfig to be a bug, not a feature.

You do need to be able to move parts around as well as replace old parts 
in an existing system.  And you need to be able to do image copies of 
drives.  What happens if you put disks with duplicate labels (for years 
they wouldn't boot...) or uuids into the same machine?   What if you put 
disks that previously used to be the same-numbered md? device from 2 
different machines into the same box?  It has been a while since I tried 
that, but it wasn't pretty.

What if you want to replace your current eth0 with a different card and 
shift the use of the existing one to a different subnet?

And all of this gets in the way when you need to restore your backups 
onto a similar but different box.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com