Gutsy and renumbered network interfaces?

[Derek Broughton]

Marius Gedminas wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 20, 2007 at 08:27:19AM -0400, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>> On Wednesday 20 June 2007, Andreas Schildbach wrote:
>> > Does anyone know why since a recent "apt-get dist-upgrade" on Gutsy my
>> > Ethernet is now mapped to eth3 (was: eth0) and my WLAN to eth2 (was:
>> > eth1)?
>> >
>> > Is this a bug, or is it intentional?
>> 
>> I'm not running Gutsy yet, but could it have anything to do with
>> /etc/iftab? This one bit me recently with VMs, where I copied a VM and
>> suddenly I had no eth0 but an eth1, because the MAC address had changed.
> 
> I think I've read on this list that Gutsy no longer uses /etc/iftab, but
> /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to record the mapping from MAC
> addresses to interface names.

I'm not running gutsy, but that doesn't make much sense to me.  I'd still
expect udev to take those rules from /etc/iftab if it exists, if only to
maintain backward compatibility,  While anybody can write udev rules, udev
development so far has tended to avoid _forcing_ us to write the rules
specifically (and even in earlier releases, udev is what actually handles
interface naming - but they use iftab if it exists).
-- 
derek