In my case, the server has four gigabit network ports. And I do in fact create bridges on them because nearly all of my services run on VMs (I run two identical servers for redundancy of the services, and run load balancing off the firewall). Honestly this isn’t really a matter of the exact interface names, but rather why the ability to give them the desired names was intentionally broken starting with Debian 11. And as a sidebar, also trying to understand why the newer system refuses to assign the predictable names, because if it did that then I would be free to simply rename them as ethX with the systemd link files the way udev used to. On the firewall with eight network ports, yeah having to give all new names to everything was a really big deal tied to a lot of different software packages. On these servers, though, there’s not much running except kvm and I only had to readdress the bridges to the new interface names and everything worked.

It’s just the principle of it that REALLY bugs me…

I’ve considered Devuan, but haven’t taken the plunge into it. The problem here is, at least to my understanding, that predictable naming is supposed to be a core part of the newer linux kernel, and since I can find no sign in dmesg that those names are even being attempted, it worries me that something very basic has been broken that I can’t go back to. I Just don’t know enough about it to risk taking down a live server to try rebuilding in a different distro without at least first understanding why exactly this particular thing is broken in Debian. “The devil you know” and all that…

Thanks for trying though, it could still easily be something I missed. And there’s the chance that somehow the BIOS is blocking systemd from setting the names but that really seems like an overreach of what the BIOS should be doing.

I mean it’s kind of cool how systemd multitasks starting up services, so like I can already ssh in before half the other things are running. And it’s certainly nice to have a lot more information now about running processes. But when it screws something up, it REALLY screws something up.

In this case, it’s just easier to remember eth0 for each of the servers, rather than having to look up the name each time I work on a different machine. There’s no software reason for it, it’s just for my own convenience. I can accept naming the interface to dmz0, it just really bugs me that debian no longer gives me an option to name things the way I want when I could easily make those changes on older versions.

BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.10.0-42-amd64 root=UUID=1a99d775-a924-43e4-9ffa-d170827cc8df ro consoleblank=600 quiet