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Revert To eth Device Names

(2014-05-05)

Problem:

I have a piece of software that expects my first ethernet device to be called eth0 , not em1.

Solution:

This worked for me.

  • add "biosdevname=0" to the kernel line in grub
  • create a /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules with these two lines (make sure the MAC addresses are those from your interfaces, not these):
    SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="f8:b1:56:ca:f0:56", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0"
    SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="68:05:ca:21:82:79", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth1"
  • rename the ifcfg-em1 file to ifcfg-eth0 and edit appropriately (change the device name) and do the same for any other def ined interfaces you have

Reboot and it should come up.

([Source: http://allaboutfedora.blogspot.ca/2011/10/f15-going-back-to-eth0-eth1.html]

Commentary

RedHat does some hand-waving saying that potentially this might be a bad idea, to the point of saying biosdevname=0 should be considered an install-time option. On the other hand it talks about removing the 70-persistent-net.rules file and that didn't exist for me. So bad things might be about to happen to me down the road, but so far I'm OK.

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