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First of all, I have to apologize: I really couldn't think of a better title, I do not really know how to describe my problem in only a few words.

So here is my problem: I just installed Windows Server 2012 R2 on an Supermicro A1SRi-2758F. This mainboard has 4 Ethernet-Ports + one dedicated IPMI Port (which I'm not using ATM). The mainboard-manual describes the port numbers as follows:

  • Lower left: LAN1
  • Lower right: LAN2
  • upper left: LAN3
  • upper right: LAN4

However, my windows numbered them differently. To make it clear, I'm not speaking of the normal name which you can easily change but of the one you see in the properties of each port. Here it is for example: Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I354 #2

Windows named them as follows: - Lower left: LAN1 -> Ethernet I354 #3 - Lower right: LAN2 -> Ethernet I354 - upper left: LAN3 -> Ethernet I354 #2 - upper right: LAN4 -> Ethernet I354 #4

I want to change it because it leads to confusion as, for example Hyper-V Manager, shows the port number from windows, which doesn't correspond to the hardware port number.

Regards Christian

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  • Windows enumerates PnP devices in a non-deterministic manner and names them in the order they're presented to the OS. Supposedly this was addressed with CDN (consistent device naming) on Dell and HP servers for Windows Server 2012 and forward.
    – joeqwerty
    Sep 10, 2015 at 22:18

2 Answers 2

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At installation, interface names are often assigned randomly. In an elevated cmd box, get list of NIC names:

netsh interface ipv4 show interface

Rename the interface to a more meaningful name

netsh interface set interface name = "Ethernet I354 #3" newname = "LAN1"
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  • Technically they're not assigned randomly. They're assigned based on the order in which they're presented to the OS. Once presented and named they don't change. If they did change then that would be random.
    – joeqwerty
    Sep 10, 2015 at 23:52
  • I suppose you are right that the order of presentation to the OS is the numbering order. But on many hardware platforms, the presentation depends on which board happened to be first to present itself on installation, which - on many systems - is quite random.
    – anneb
    Sep 10, 2015 at 23:59
  • Hey anneb Thatnk you for your reply! The procedure you're speaking of only renames the "visible" names, not the device names. Unfortunately, this doesn't help me much, because Hyper-V Manager only shows the device name (the one you see in device manager, for example) I found a tutorial thought on how to rename the interfaces in the registry, I do not know if this is a good idea though ;)
    – Christian
    Sep 11, 2015 at 8:30
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I ended up changing the "friedly name" of the NICs in the registry. I don't know if this is the nice way to go, but it seems to work and solved my problem ;)

(Not an actual tutorial but I dont want to link to external sites, and the text of user "joshdan" gives a pretty good overview of what I did). https://superuser.com/questions/437755/rename-devices-in-device-manager

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