How to use old network device naming convention

It is a matter of personal preference whether you use current or former network device naming convention. I am more accustomed to the latter and will configure the operating system to retain the old behavior.

The new naming scheme is thoroughly described in systemd/src/udev/udev-builtin-net_id.c with many useful examples, so I will skip that part.

As you can see, the interface name is wlp2s0, thanks to this, we can easily determine the type of this device and where it is located, but it really doesn’t matter (see one-liner at the end of this article). We want to see a good old wlan0 name.

$ ip link show

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: wlp2s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 5c:e0:c5:9d:63:f9 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Add the net.ifnames=0 (disable policies by which the interface name should be set) to the normal boot options inside /etc/default/grub file.

$ sudo sed -i -e "/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT/ s/=\"/=\"net.ifnames=0 /" /etc/default/grub

Update the GRUB configuration.

$ sudo update-grub

Update /etc/network/interfaces configuration file. Do not forget about this step.

Reboot system.

$ sudo reboot

Display network device configuration to verify the used naming convention.

$ ip link show

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 5c:e0:c5:9d:63:f9 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff

Additional notes

You can compare device names using the following one-liner.

$ udevadm info -e | awk 'BEGIN{RS="\n\n";FS="\n"} {i[2]=p[2]="";for(x=1;x<=NF;x++) {if (match($x,/E: INTERFACE/)) split($x,i,"=");if (match($x,/E: ID_NET_NAME_PATH/)) split($x,p,"=");if (i[2] && p[2]) {print "Interface "i[2] " is named by path as " p[2];i[2]=p[2]="";}}}'

Interface wlan0 is named by path as wlp2s0

Interface eth0 is named by path as enp0s3

Interface eth0 is named by path as enp32s0
Interface eth1 is named by path as enp34s0

Policies by which the interface name should be set are defined in /lib/systemd/network/99-default.link configuration file using NamedPolicy option.

$ cat  /lib/systemd/network/99-default.link

[Link]
NamePolicy=kernel database onboard slot path
MACAddressPolicy=persistent

Additional notes#

Additional notes