Bug#878590: systemd: jessie to stretch upgrade resulted in eth0 being given a new style predictable name (enp1s9)

Philip Hands phil at hands.com
Sat Oct 14 21:56:40 BST 2017


Package: systemd
Version: 232-25+deb9u1
Severity: important

Hi,

After upgrading to Stretch, the system came up with its NIC named as
enp1s9, and thus had no working network (since eth0 was configured
in /etc/network/interfaces), requiring me to get console access to
fix things.

I suspect that this is the result of me having two empty udev rules
files on the system, prior to the upgrade:

 udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
 udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules

Those empty files being there in order to ensure that the one NIC in
the machine will never end up being called anything other than eth0,
not even if the NIC gets replaced.

It is my suspicion that something is checking for the existence of
the persistent-net rules file, and if it is there, is assuming that it
contains a rule to keep the NIC named as whatever it was named before.

If that is the case, I broke that assumption.

I can imagine that dealing with this case automatically might be rather
tiresome.

I would have been happy if the upgrade had failed with a warning that
having an empty 70-persistent-net.rules is not supported, and that I
should take steps to either define the new names in network/interfaces,
or add net.ifnames=0 to the kernel command line, or perhaps recommending
a new udev rule that would have the effect of naming the one NIC in the
machine as 'en0' say, if there is a nice way of doing that which survives
the NIC being replaced.

If something else is going on, I realise that this report is very light
on detail, and will be happy to do any tests, or provide any further
details to work out what's really going on here -- please just ask.

I believe that what I did was the recommended way of getting the behaviour
I wanted, and that the intention was that NIC naming should be preserved
on upgrade, hence the severity of important, since this breaks networking,
which might cause significant inconvenience for people.

I'm sorry if this should be reported against e.g. udev instead, but the
persistent naming seems to be under the aegis of systemd, so this seemed
like a reasonable starting point -- please reassign as appropriate.

BTW I note that the recommendation from here:
  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames/
to restore the old behaviour by doing:

  ln -s /dev/null /etc/systemd/network/99-default.link

does not work on this system, so at present I'm adding net.ifnames=0 to
the kernel command line to restore the 'eth0' name.

Cheers, Phil.


-- Package-specific info:

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.1
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages systemd depends on:
ii  adduser         3.115
ii  libacl1         2.2.52-3+b1
ii  libapparmor1    2.11.0-3
ii  libaudit1       1:2.6.7-2
ii  libblkid1       2.29.2-1
ii  libc6           2.24-11+deb9u1
ii  libcap2         1:2.25-1
ii  libcryptsetup4  2:1.7.3-4
ii  libgcrypt20     1.7.6-2+deb9u2
ii  libgpg-error0   1.26-2
ii  libidn11        1.33-1
ii  libip4tc0       1.6.0+snapshot20161117-6
ii  libkmod2        23-2
ii  liblz4-1        0.0~r131-2+b1
ii  liblzma5        5.2.2-1.2+b1
ii  libmount1       2.29.2-1
ii  libpam0g        1.1.8-3.6
ii  libseccomp2     2.3.1-2.1
ii  libselinux1     2.6-3+b3
ii  libsystemd0     232-25+deb9u1
ii  mount           2.29.2-1
ii  procps          2:3.3.12-3
ii  util-linux      2.29.2-1

Versions of packages systemd recommends:
ii  dbus            1.10.22-0+deb9u1
ii  libpam-systemd  232-25+deb9u1

Versions of packages systemd suggests:
pn  policykit-1        <none>
pn  systemd-container  <none>
pn  systemd-ui         <none>

Versions of packages systemd is related to:
pn  dracut           <none>
ii  initramfs-tools  0.130
ii  udev             232-25+deb9u1

-- no debconf information



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