Proxmox 7.3 network interfaces rename/reorder

[Urbaman]

Hi,

I am installing on a system with 3 network cards (4+4+2 ports).
I am trying to provide the best assignment to the ports so that moving cables would be easier, but stumbled with the fact that the first card seems to have switched ports and do not know how to handle this.

Physical order	Proxmox nic name	Proxmox wanted nic name
Card1, port1	eno3	eno1
Card1, port2	eno4	eno2
Card1, port3	eno1	eno3
Card1, port4	eno2	eno4
Card2, port1	enp5s0f0	enp5s0f0
Card2, port2	enp5s0f1	enp5s0f1
.....	.....	.....
Card3, port1	enp129s0f0	enp129s0f0
....	.....	....

As you can see, ports of the first card do not match the real physical order, while the other two cards do.
How can I manage this to achieve the third column?

I could also rename all of the nics to eth1...eth10 to solve the issue, but do not know the best practice to achieve it.

Thank you very mutch.

 

[sterzy]

Hi,

I think you would be better of just accepting how the NICs are named in column 2. This is based on the "predictable names" scheme [1]. Basically the idea is to give the NICs names based on the hardware location in your system.

The Debian wiki [1] also outlines how you could (previously) use a different naming scheme and why you probably don't want to:

Why this one was abandoned​

This still had subtle race conditions, required /etc to be on a writable file system, and had problems with virtualization, so it's no longer supported upstream. The plan (still taken for granted in most of the documentation) was for it not to be supported in Debian 10 "buster", but hand-crafted .rules files should continue to work. In Debian 11 "bullseye" this is not working anymore (though details are unclear; udev still accepts .rules files, and claims they can rename interfaces, so what has changed?)

How to cling to it for now​

If you've got a working "legacy" /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and want to stick with it, you can safely upgrade through Debian 9 "stretch" and Debian 10 "buster". The udev on these releases still respects that file if present (and will accept a freshly created one). However, bear in mind that you'll need to maintain it yourself, and be ready to switch to a different scheme for Debian 11 "bullseye", which lacks this legacy support.

So tl;dr: Previous schemes had all kinds of issues and were abandoned. You could use a custom .rules under /etc/udev/rules.d/ to cling to an older scheme or a custom one. Debian 11 bullseye (which is the base for PVE 7.x) does not really support that anymore (although, the wiki does state that documentation on this isn't really clear) so you'd be better off to just transition and get used to the naming scheme.

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkInterfaceNames#predictable

 

[Urbaman]

Gosh...

Having three machines with the very same hardware, I really hope second and third machine will follow the same scheme, or we'll go crazy keeping it clean and ordered.

Thank you!

 

[sterzy]

Note to self: read the entire wiki page before posting here.

There is a way to overwrite this that is considered canonical. How to do that is described further down [1].

[1]: https://wiki.debian.org/NetworkInterfaceNames#CUSTOM_SCHEMES_USING_.LINK_FILES

 

[Urbaman]

Thank you again, I was just crossposting with that

... and says it's "futureproof"...

 

[sterzy]

... and says it's "futureproof"...

Let's hope that's true