Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Change/Resassign Interface Name In Linux

Depending on the linux distro, the interface name given to network cards differ.
For example, on one distro Intel Giga bit Ethernet card might be detected as eth0 and Broadcom card as eth1 while with another distro this might be reversed. This causes a lot of problem, when one uses automated scripts which hardcode "eth0" and "eth1". In older distros it was matter of changing few network scripts to get this working. One can also use "ip" command to make this change temporarily. But to make it permanent it needs to be changed in udev. Here is how simple it is to change the ethernet names.
NOTE: This is only tested on F-10 and Ubuntu 9.04. Its expected to be the same for other distros. Only the name of the udev script might change.

Edit the rule script:

#vim /etc /udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Here the list of n/w adapters and their names are specified!
Change the field NAME="eth0" to NAME="eth1" or vice versa
Remember to rename the other adapter whose name you have borrowed.
Restart the system and you will find the new names interchanged!

2 comments:

Jitesh Shah said...

aah!
nice thing to know!

varun said...

your are welcome!