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I have a DELL server running RedHat EL 6.3 with two 1G network interfaces, and two 10G network interfaces.

Following this note, I have successfully renamed the two 1G network interfaces that used to be called em1 and em2. However, I cannot rename the 10G network interfaces using this method. (Those are called p4p1 and p4p2, and do not start with em.)

How can I rename the network interface name of my 10G network interfaces on RedHat EL 6.3?

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  • If you're just renaming them back to the old eth* names, you're just wasting your time and setting yourself up for trouble in the future. The consistent naming feature makes your job easier; it's strongly recommended to use them.
    – Michael Hampton
    Jan 8, 2013 at 16:41
  • I'm renaming them back to eth* names because I have no choice. A certain piece of software (which I have no control over) imposes the eth* names.
    – Randomblue
    Jan 8, 2013 at 16:43
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    Oh, what an unholy mess some of those old legacy software...
    – Michael Hampton
    Jan 8, 2013 at 16:44
  • Beware that recent udev (really systemd) versions no longer support assigning stable eth* names to interfaces (although this obviously won't affect RHEL6, the new code may turn up in RHEL7). A workaround I can think of is using numbers which are not less than the total number of interfaces in the system (e.g., if you definitely do not expect more than 4 eth* interfaces, you can assign stable names starting with eth4, so that they will not overlap with names automatically assigned by the kernel).
    – Sergey Vlasov
    Jun 3, 2013 at 15:03

2 Answers 2

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As the section of the appendix you linked to states, it's strongly recommended to enable or disable the consistent network device naming feature at install time; doing so after installation is messy and not guaranteed to work, as you've discovered.

To do this, install the system passing biosdevname=0 on the boot command line when booting the installation media, and add the same parameter to the grub boot command line.

Since you've just installed the system anyway, this shouldn't be too big of a headache...

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I know that my answer is really late, but this can help other people searching for this information, so here it goes:

It is better to give these 2 options as kernel parameters:

biosdevname=0 net.ifnames=0

To add this to the boot you can do:

/sbin/grubby --update-kernel=`/sbin/grubby --default-kernel` --args="biosdevname=0 net.ifnames=0 "

Or modify the /etc/default/grub and add biosdevname=0 net.ifnames=0"" to the **GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and regenerate grub configuration:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Example of the /etc/default/grub entry:

# cat /etc/default/grub
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.lvm.lv=rhel_7/swap rd.luks.uuid=luks-cc387312-6da6-469a-8e49-b40cd58ad67a crashkernel=auto  vconsole.keymap=us vconsole.font=latarcyrheb-sun16 rd.lvm.lv=rhel_7/root rhgb quiet net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
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