No, I don't want persistent net rules

Question

I have a bootable Linux memstick that I use on a lot of different PCs (but all of the same model and configuration). Trouble is that udev is renaming the eth interfaces so that what was eth0 on the last PC is suddenly ethX, where X=1..inf. This causes if-up (called by ifplugd) to fail, since /etc/network/interfaces only specifies how to bring up eth0:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

It's a well-known problem; I've googled and found that this is caused by the MAC addresses changing and that it may be fixed by deleting /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. But that only works after a reboot, which is inconvenient and should be unneccessary, since I know what behaviour I want.

What I want is non-persistent net rules, or in the alternative, an /etc/network/interfaces script that adapts to the changing eth names, or perhaps it can be done with ifplugd. What's the best way to achieve this?

Distro: Ubuntu 8.04.

Answer 1

The persistent net rules are generated by /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules (or something similar, I'm looking on a newer Debian machine).

If Ubuntu 8.04 still has that generator script in /etc/udev/rules.d, you can just get rid of it.

Otherwise, I believe putting a blank file in /etc/udev/rules.d will override the one in /lib.

You could also write your own rules file to give the interface a name—the persistent rules generator ignores the interface if a name has already been set.

Answer 2

I followed derobert's advice, deleting /etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules, and also I edited the already generated /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules so that the lines looked like this:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="%k"

Note the %k in NAME, which means to use the kernel name.