Thanks for the replies! I'm hoping to test exporting my VM to an OVF and deploying it on our VCenter today to see what happens with the interface.

What still confuses me a bit is understanding why I'm getting eth0 rather than the new complex names...unless that's because I'm not running network manager(?). I certainly haven't changed any boot parameters etc. I'm also a little thrown as to why I'm currently not getting that auto-generated udev file at all (70-persistent-net.rules) or any others, even though udev is clearly running.

I'm not complaining, and I'd love it if that continued...I'm just not clear why it's behaving that way. Currently I have "auto eth0" in /etc/network/interfaces and, again, no network manager installed. As far as I can see, the only thing that gets changed automatically is /etc/resolv.conf and only if I set eth0 up for dhcp rather than static. That's exactly what I want.

If anyone understands why it's behaving so nicely I'd like to understand.

On an unrelated note: This has been my first use of anything related to Debian and I'm pretty thrilled all in all. I can say for sure that apt puts yum into the trash heap it deserves for sure. One feature that blew me away is the fact that I was able to install Tcl expect without unwanted (suggested) dependencies of tk by using "apt-get install expect tk8.6-". Too cool. For a binary distribution that reminded me of the flexibility I have with Gentoo.

Thanks again!
Tom

Holy good lord...just started reading this. One thing I need to get straight before I even ask any further questions, as there are two separate potential issues here:

What I was referring to specifically, as we ran into on CentOS 6, is when udev records an identifier for for a specific NIC card in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. If the same VM boots in a different VM environment, it will end up with eth1 rather than eth0 unless that file has been removed, so we remove it at shutdown. I actually did a similar thing with a Gentoo install of my MythTV frontend, because I occasionally swap the hard drive with an identical backup computer and I have it configured for eth0.

The other issue, which I recall from way back with my Gentoo machines, was that switch to the entirely different naming scheme that replaces the eth0 naming. Under Gentoo that was prevented by simply adding a dummy file at /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-name-slot.rules. I'm assuming we didn't run into that in CentOS 6 as that uses udev 147.

After that I have a lot of questions...for example, what caused me to get eth0 in this install instead of the new naming scheme...given that that's using udev 215?

Is there anything the freedesktop.org folks haven't screwed up? Under Gentoo I'm using eudev. I'm not sure if the fix above regarding 80-net-name-slot.rules was specific to just eudev or not. As a matter of fact I've also replaced that grub 2 nightmare with syslinux...I wasn't not much happier with that than any of this udev stuff.

Thanks for the replies!!...(I think ).

Tom