Comment 46 for bug 1284043

The first answer (from Sebastian Marsching) on this page worked for me:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/767786/changing-network-interfaces-name-ubuntu-16-04

In brief, he recommended removing the KERNEL=="eth*" parameter from each line in the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file.

I am running 16.04.1 on several x86_64 systems, and I want / need / insist upon custom names of my own choosing for the various network interfaces -- such as "grn" (green) for LAN interfaces, and "red" for WAN. This allows me, for example, to configure firewall rules (via Shorewall) in a consistent manner on all systems. I understand the motivation behind both of the old (eth0) and new (p1p2) naming styles, and I'm not objecting to people using either of these as long as the custom option (by tweaking 70-persistent-net.rules) is still available as well.

Here is a sample 70-persistent-net.rules file from one of my servers -- again, this box is running 16.04.1:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="40:16:7e:b4:45:f8", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="grn"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:18:f8:0e:7b:e1", ATTR{dev_id}=="0x0", ATTR{type}=="1", NAME="red"

and the relevant line from this server's /etc/default/grub file is:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="net.ifnames=1 biosdevname=0"

and the network interfaces are in fact named "grn" and "red" (as confirmed via "ifconfig").