James was trying to allocate a static IP address to his Pi. He did what he’d always done and allocated the static address to eth0 but was then bewildered as to why it wasn’t working. He discovered that the naming convention for network interfaces has changed in the new version of Raspbian (Stretch) to an amalgam that includes the MAC address of the Ethernet port. He’s written up his findings on his blog.
Update: This only effects brand new installs of Raspbian. So, if you upgrade your Jessie to Stretch using apt, the interface names stay the same. The interface names change, however, if you install Raspbian Stretch from scratch.
I personally think this is “a bit crap”. I know it’s becoming the ‘standard way of doing things’ but for goodness sake… To change something like this is in the “almost pointless” category in my eyes. But what do I know?
Update 6/11/2017 – Raspbian devs have listened!
The changes to the names of network interfaces has been reversed:
Changelog: Disable predictable network interface names for Ethernet devices
I agree – I can find no reasonable argument to change the names.
I can only hope this gets changed back to the standard value.
21.8.2017
I think I need to revise my last comment.
The new naming sems now to be a forthcoming standard rather than just the Strech version.
I I think one must adapt and use the new naming conventions.
I don’t have an enormous problem with the naming change… per se… I just think it’s something that needs to be red-flagged when announcing the release so it doesn’t take someone happening across it to show it up.
@Michael Horne: It is mentioned in the release notes
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-whats-new.html The article on Stretch on the raspberrypi.org website linked to these release notes.
Yes, I’m sure it did. However, you can’t expect the ordinary Pi user to read very technical release notes or to even understand the ramifications even if they did read them.
It’s the typical arrogance of “we know best”. I wonder how much the changes were highlighted to avoid problems?