I know this is systemd-punching day, but at least get your information straight.
On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 03:38:03PM -0400, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Why change names, such as rpc-idmapd to nfs-idmapd?
Unrelated to systemd, as far as I can tell. Fedora adopted new names that made more sense, and it was incorporated into RHEL7.
And I've just been fighting today, because I have to munge the MAC address for a workstation, because they have old software that is very usefull, and there's no budget to pay the company that bought the software $15k (no kidding) so that they can shift the license to the new workstation, and that's tied to eth0 and the MAC.
And *why* random NIC names? Quick, you've got servers from 5 manufacturers, of different ages... what's the NIC going to be called? Do names like enp5s0 offer any convenience to *anyone* not a hardware engineer?
Unrelated to systemd. This actually started happening in RHEL6 with the biosdevname feature. systemd can handle the NIC naming stuff, but it started happening well before systemd appeared in RHEL.
Having consistent device names is helpful when you've got more than one NIC and you don't want to rely on the order in which the network driver is loaded to define the interface name.