interfaces(5) man page should mention 70-persistent-net.rules for consistent eth* naming

Bug #1295348 reported by ash
8
This bug affects 1 person
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manpages
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ifupdown (Ubuntu)
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Bug Description

Currently interfaces(5) says in KNOWN BUGS/LIMITATIONS:

       Unfortunately it can happen that the kernel assigns different physical
       interface names to the same hardware at different times; for example,
       what was called "eth0" last time you booted is now called "eth1" and
       vice versa. This creates a problem if you want to configure the
       interfaces appropriately. A way to deal with this problem is to use
       mapping scripts that choose logical interface names according to the
       properties of the interface hardware. See the get-mac-address.sh
       script in the examples directory for an example of such a mapping
       script. See also Debian bug #101728.

The modern solution, described in Debian docs [1], is to use edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. I suggest we stop talking about confusing get-mac-address.sh script and instead replace the last two "See…" sentences with:

       See /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules for a way to set interface names persistently.

I realize that Debian docs is linked at the end of this man page. But it's not clear it will help with consistent names problem, because KNOWN BUGS says get-mac-address.sh is needed for this. Let's help people new to all these things! We've all been there :-)

[1]: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch05.en.html

ash (shamrin)
description: updated
John Kim (kotux)
tags: added: bitesize string-fix
affects: ubuntu → ifupdown (Ubuntu)
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