OK I had better explain. First of all I do want the old interface names but they were not eth0 & eth1 on this system. They were eno1 & eno2, even under debian. Its a Asus P10S-I motherboard which is normally in use but I took it out of service to see how well Beowulf & Xen were working. Now I don't care that the name changed from en0? to eth? but I really don't want the interfaces coming up in a different order. reason: in production eno1 is the local controlling network whereas eno2 is the internet and there is a third network for iKVM but Linux doesn't see that.

Now I can adjust but at the moment I have been switching back and forth with Debian and I was merely trying to avoid making a silly mistake and exposing the whole machine to the world.

What is even more interesting is this:

udevadm test-builtin net_id /sys/class/net/eth0 2>/dev/null
ID_NET_NAME_MAC=enx40b07690b669
ID_NET_NAME_ONBOARD=eno2
ID_NET_LABEL_ONBOARD=enINTEL I210
ID_NET_NAME_PATH=enp3s0

There you can see the original name and presumably the 'new name' that it might have been given but wasn't, but nowhere is eth1 mentioned!

Hope this explains it a bit and I know about the kernel param but like I said, I want the old names not the new.

K.

So if for no other reason, where are the names & order set up? I used to set the order in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules but that apparently will stop working in the future and in Beowulf the file doesn't exist.