Readers' forum

In chapter 6, pages 334 and 335, ifrename and udev are discussed as methods of renaming network devices. After upgrading a firewall system from a 2.4 to a 2.6 kernel, today, I was faced with the need for device renaming as the new kernel initialized the devices in a different order.

After experimenting with both ifrename and udev, I discovered nameif, part of the net-tools package. nameif may not be the right solution for hot swappable devices, but I found it much easier to configure for my needs. Just provide a simple device name / MAC address map in /etc/mactab and call nameif in an appropriate init.d script.

nameif also has the advantage of being included with net-tools and therefore readily available on virtually any Debian system without installing additional packages.

I may move to udev in the future, but nameif played nice with both kernel versions and that is important for me, at the moment.

Interesting. I had not seen nameif before. Thanks for taking the time to let us know!

Here's where I found reference to nameif:

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/ch-gateway.en.html#s-high-rename