Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15
Systems running Linux have long had ethernet network devices named ethX. Your desktop likely has one ethernet port, named eth0. This works fine if you have only one network port, but what if, like on Dell PowerEdge servers, you have four ethernet ports? They are named eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3, corresponding to the labels on the back of the chassis, 1, 2, 3, 4, respectively. Sometimes. Aside from the obvious confusion of names starting at 0 verses starting at 1, other race conditions can happen such that each port may not get the same name on every boot, and they may get named in an arbitrary order. If you add in a network card to a PCI slot, it gets even worse, as the ports on the motherboard and the ports on the add-in card may have their names intermixed."
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