“Who among us has not experienced the joy of rebooting a
multi-homed Linux server, and found that our network interfaces
have come up in a different order, and been assigned different
names by the kernel? This is especially amusing when doing a kernel
upgrade on multiple servers, and all of them do the
random-re-assignment dance. Sure, everyone knows we have all the
time in the world for useless tasks like re-configuring network
cards, but still, there must be a better way.“Of course there is a better way, else I would not be writing
this article. The ifrename utility, by the esteemed Jean Tourrilhes
of the Wireless Tools for Linux project, assigns permanent,
arbitrary names to all types of network interfaces: ISA, PCI, USB,
CardBus, and PCMCIA…”