Device Renaming Still Broken on Raspberry Pi

[Jim Starkey]

Device renaming is broken on the Raspberry Pi causing a major regression and making headless deployment of WiFi base systems impossible.

A brief summary is:

1. Stable device names were introduced in an update to 16.04 which caused network devices to be renamed breaking any network configuration based on /etc/network/interfaces.

2. A workaround to restore the old behavior was published involving adding "net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0" to /boot/cmdline.txt.

3. The workaround does not work. It has no effect. It was, apparently, never tested.

4. The bug is in the file "/lib/udev/rules.d/73-usb-net-by-mac.rules". Replacing the first comma in the line starting "IMPORT" with a new line fixes the bug, at least until the next software update.

5. The bug is a major regression, breaking existing systems, and making WiFi based headless system impossible (without the fix, of course).

6. The bug was documented and reported as #1623616 which was closed as "opinion/wishlist", again without being tested. And as the bug report referenced the purported workaround (#2 above) and it was closed with a referral to this workaround, it was obviously closed without having even been read.

The Raspberry Pi is not a toy but one of the most influential platforms in computing, particularly in the context of the Internet of Things.

If the Ubuntu/Mate project wishes to wash its hand of the Raspberry Pi, it should do so clearly and openly so Raspberry Pi users and find a more responsive distribution.

I have been a software developer for over 40 years, have a network involvement going back to the ARPAnet, and have been a major player in two open source database projects. I have never witnessed a more irresponsibly managed project than Ubuntu Mate networking.

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

This was resolved in Ubuntu MATE 16.04.02 for the Raspberry Pi 2. and 3.

  * http://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/