Whacked out ethernet names

Whacked out ethernet names appeared in Linux Mint 18. Names such as enp3s0 came from nowhere and broke piles of programs and network connectivity by taking away the expected “eth0”. The logic is that such weirdness is “more predictable” than calling the only network adapter in your system “eth0”. For more information on the philosophies of these godlets see https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/.

For a supposed workaround to restore predictable names

mask udev’s rule file for the default policy:

ln -s /dev/null /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-setup-link.rules

There are more comments, such as

I updated a virtual machine running Ubuntu server 15.04 to the just released new stable 15.10.

There were no apparent problems, but after reboot the machine lost its network connection. lspci showed the correct card and lsmod proved that the driver had been loaded.

Hints about editing or removing /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules did not succeed (still no network, no new file), the famous /lib/udev/write_net_rules did not even exist.

I don’t have much clue regarding udev and systemd, so it took me some time to find in /sys/class/net that the network interface name changed. It became ens32, which was renamed from eth0. After I changed /etc/network/interfaces network communication was enabled again.

…

Now that I deleted the virtual network card and created another one, eth0 becomes eno16777728, which is not so, uhm, nice.  http://askubuntu.com/questions/689070/network-interface-name-changes-after-update-to-15-10-udev-changes

And comments on a fix http://askubuntu.com/questions/689070/network-interface-name-changes-after-update-to-15-10-udev-changes

There is an easier way told by the ArchWiki Beginnersguide.

First get your devices MAC Address by

$ ip link

The output show by like

3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000     
          link/ether 20:68:9d:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Your devices MAC address is the

20:68:9d:xx:xx:xx

Just create the file (simply open with sudo rights in a text editor)

$ nano /etc/udev/rules.d/10-network.rules    

Add following line

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", ATTR{address}=="aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff", NAME="net1"

Replace name with your wanted name and aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff with your devices MAC address.

Now just reboot your computer and the device name should have changed.