# Network interface name changed on reboot

## trevynmace

My first post. I was having an issue with a gentoo box that we have at work yesterday. For some reason the tomcat service would be running but it wouldn't serve the site attached to it. Anyway, I was remote and rebooted the machine. The machine wouldn't come back up though so when I got in this morning I went to see what was going on. The network interface had changed from eth0 to enp3s0. I'm aware of the enpXsX type names on other machines but eth0 has been working fine on this machine for several months now without problem. I didn't make any changes to the interface or even to the machine except rebooting it when the site wouldn't work. As soon as I changed my symlinks and conf.d for enp3s0 instead of eth0, it worked fine and even the site came up on its own without error. My question is what could cause the network interface name to change from eth0 to enpXsX without any changes made to the machine? My concern comes because this is a production server and needs to stay up constantly and now I'm worried that this issue may happen again in the future and I would like to prevent it. I'm fully aware it could've been something purely on my end that needs looked at with the network or anything else, but I'm just wondering if there's any indication of what could cause this somewhere.

Thanks!

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## eccerr0r

You probably picked up the udev package and the 'predictable' names got you.  I sort of wished the default of leaving the existing method of eth0 instead of switching to enp3s0 though the latter is technically better in case someone plugs in an ethernet adapter without removing the old one, the same name is used for the existing adapter no matter how the new adapter is connected.  (Then again, if the card was replaced in failure, the 'new' card could get a new name...)

I think this was shown in the portage news.  You can run 'eselect news list' to view the topics, and one of them should be the predictable naming topic.

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## trevynmace

Ah yes, that's definitely what happened. Good to know though, and I'll make sure to read the news more carefully in the future. Thanks!

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