What would cause a network interface to change name?

[BeyondEvil]

My server was working fine. Then I shut it down to add some disks. When bringing it backup, it had zero networking.

After some digging around (I'm already bald, so unfortunately there were no hair to pull out) I noticed that the interface had changed name from “enp5s0” to “enp6s0”.

Once I updated the configuration in '/etc/network/interfaces' to the new name, everything started working again.

 

[Dunuin]

My server was working fine. Then I shut it down to add some disks. When bringing it backup, it had zero networking.

Probably NVMe SSDs? Adding or removing PCIe devices (which NVMe SSDs are too) will cause the PCIe addresses to change and as the NICs are named after the PCIe address they won't match your existing network configuration anymore.

 

[BeyondEvil]

Probably NVMe SSDs? Adding or removing PCIe devices (which NVMe SSDs are too) will cause the PCIe addresses to change and as the NICs are named after the PCIe address they won't match your existing network configuration anymore.

Yeah I did some more research and read about the predictable network interface naming. Which revealed the "lspci" command to me.

It was definitely the addition of the nvme m.2 drives that changed the name.

In the docs I also read that it's possible to set the iface name explicitly. Is that a good idea?