Context for newbies: Linux refers to network adapters (wifi cards, ethernet cards, etc.) by so called “interfaces”. For the longest time, the interface names were assigned based on the type of device and the order in which the system discovered it. So, eth0, eth1, wlan0, and wwan0 are all possible interface names. This, however, can be an issue: “the order in which the system discovered it” is not deterministic, which means hardware can switch interface names across reboots. This can be a real issue for things like servers that rely on interface names staying the same.

The solution to this issue is to assign custom names based on MAC address. The MAC address is hardcoded into the network adaptor, and will not change. (There are other ways to do this as well, such as setting udev rules).

Redhat, however, found this solution too simple and instead devised their own scheme for assigning network interface names. It fails at solving the problem it was created to solve while making it much harder to type and remember interface names.

To disable predictable interface naming and switch back to the old scheme, add net.ifnames=0 and biosdevname=0 to your boot paramets.

The template for this meme is called “stop doing math”.

  • farcaller@fstab.sh
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    5 months ago

    There’s a whole bunch of “it loses all your data” bugs in OpenZFS too, ironically, although it’s way way less fragile than btrfs in general.

    That said, the latter is pretty much solid too, unless you do raid5-like things.

    • notabot
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      5 months ago

      Yeah, I know there was one a while back, and if you don’t use ECC RAM, given enough time, it will eat your data as it tries to correct checksum errors due to memory corruption. That’s why we keep backups, right. Right?

      I tend to assume that every storage system will eventually lose data, so having multiple copies is vital.