Re: [gentoo-user] Browsers cannot access WWW while ping and host utilities work as expected.

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 5 August 2013, at 18:28, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> ...
> So why change this? Because you can't rely on ethX always being the same
> physical hardware. On a firewall or router, you absolutely need to rely
> on this. The udev scheme works around this by letting you specify exact
> rules that will always do what you want.
> 
> Why was this changed rammed down your throat? Well, that is political.
> 
> The udev maintainers (along with systemd) work for Red Hat. RH's market
> is almost totally servers, and big multi-nic ones at that. They really
> need consistent names, doubly so if the host is a virtualization host.
> 
> The catch: RH (or more exactly the udev maintainer employed by RH)
> probably couldn't give a toss what you think or want, and went ahead and
> fixed their problem expecting you to "deal with it or shove off"


I believe this all stems from the rejection of BIOS dev names by Linus &/or the kernel folks.

This would have allowed the kernel to determine which interfaces were eth0 / eth1 from the BIOS / firmware of next gen server machines.

An open "standard" to present this information through the firmware was agreed between at least Dell and one other major server vendor (HP springs to mind).

The patches were rejected by the kernel folks because they risked renaming the interfaces on the small number of machines already in service with this firmware facility. 

I believe the response was "do it in userspace, go talk to the udev guys", and the rest is history.

Stroller.