Networking changes?

[jiml8]

I just completed the upgrade of an OpenSUSE 12.3 virtual machine to 13.1. This upgrade did not go smoothly, which is unusual for OpenSUSE.

I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say the upgrade crashed about 3/4 of the way through, forcing me to reboot an incomplete upgrade and pray it would start.

Well, it did come up into 13.1, sort of, but with no network connectivity. Because I was doing a network upgrade, I needed network connectivity to finish, even though I had told zypper (the installer) to download everything before installing anything.

So, the interface eth0 was not being found, even though it was properly defined everywhere, including in the udev rules. I fooled around with that for a bit, then decided to see if yast could and would configure the interface.

Yast worked, and set up the interface, but named it ens33 rather than eth0. Now, the VM thinks the ethernet interface is an ensoniq device (hence, I suppose, the "ens") but I have no idea about the "33". I DO have a lot of interfaces available and defined on this VM which I use for one purpose and another, and there could indeed be 32 of them so the 33 might mean this is the 33rd interface, but I haven't counted them and I am not sure.

Now, unless OpenSUSE is going off into the weeds the way Ubuntu has, this suggests a change in the network architecture is coming. Will Mageia 4 behave this way? I note that the udev rule has a very different syntax in the 13.1 distro vs any previous distro; is there a big change coming in udev on Mageia? If so, what is the motivation?

IMNSHO, change for the sake of change is useless and often destructive and disruptive. There needs to be a good reason for this, if it is happening.

[lula]

Hi,

i also noticed it on OpenSuse 13.1 and Mageia4 beta where my wlan0 interface was renamed to wln-someting. There's a page about it at freedestop.org explaining what happens and at the bottom of the page there are some solutions to work-around or disable that new "feature". http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwar ... faceNames/ .

Lutz

[ITA84]

Now, unless OpenSUSE is going off into the weeds the way Ubuntu has, this suggests a change in the network architecture is coming. Will Mageia 4 behave this way? I note that the udev rule has a very different syntax in the 13.1 distro vs any previous distro; is there a big change coming in udev on Mageia? If so, what is the motivation?

I believe the new naming is due to systemd-networkd (apparently to ensure predictable network interface names). I don't know how it works.

I'm on Caludron and haven't had any problems (I'm using NetworkManager though), but I don't know if any migration scripts were applied: the Wiki has this feature listed for Mageia 4, but there have been no updates.

[doktor5000]

No real migration. As the device name is created by udev at boot time or when hotplugging, the device name will just change after the update.
So we also have thi for current cauldron as we use a current systemd version. The freedesktop wiki page has all the details and workarounds.

[jiml8]

Interesting.

I have to say that I personally have encountered every problem with the naming conventions that they discuss in that wiki, and the only one of them that really bothers me is the one associated with moving a USB stick installation from platform to platform; that is a bit of a PITA when I need networking on the next platform...but this new mechanism won't fix that if the hardware is different across platforms (as it usually is).

This also will make it more difficult to just sit down at an unfamiliar Linux system and work on it; first I have to determine what the interface names are and what they are connected to.

It will help a bit in the rare case where you are forced to swap a failed network interface card; this will save you from having to edit the persistent network rules for udev. Big deal.

To me, looks like a solution in search of a problem, and I can say with confidence that it will cause certain software to break.