When a Linux server has multiple network interfaces, it may be be necessary to choose which NIC gets assigned which name. In particular, we recently had to swap out a NIC that couldn’t handle 100 Meg/Full duplex. After swapping the NIC, if the OS was allowed to choose the interface names by itself, it had them backwards from what they previously were. We have a bunch of networking scripts that had the interface names hard coded, so we didn’t want to change all of those.
After some googling, I came across this page that described how to do it. This allows you to choose which NIC gets which name, based on the MAC address. Simply create a file in /etc/udev/rules.d that contains something like this:
KERNEL=="eth?", SYSFS{address}=="aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff", NAME="eth0"
KERNEL=="eth?", SYSFS{address}=="00:11:22:33:44:55", NAME="eth1"