what is p2p1?

[ToddAndMargo]

Hi All,

I am confused. :'(


I just installed the FC15 64 bit Xfce live spin to my hard drive. I seem to be connected to the Internet just fine (yum even works).

"ifconfig" shows my Internet connection to be through an interface called "p2p1". What is "p2p1"? And what happened to "eth0"? And there is no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-p2p1 either. My network card is suppose to be an Intel Pro 100. What am I missing?

Many thanks,
-T

[marko]

There was a decision to have the ethernet ports named so that it's easy to identify those embedded in the motherboard vs ethernet bus cards

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Featur...rkDeviceNaming

even better is to refer to :

file:///usr/share/doc/HTML/fedora-release-notes/en-US/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Desktop_Users.html#sect-RelNotes-Networking

after you install Fedora 15. The Release notes are in the KDE menu in System -> Release Notes or you cou could just load that
URL above directly in any browser on the machine

Note that like those references say, if you don't like that slot number / port number naming convention you can override it with
the new biosdevname=0 kernel option which you can put in the /boot/grub/grub.conf file

[ToddAndMargo]

Originally Posted by marko

There was a decision to have the ethernet ports named so that it's easy to identify those embedded in the motherboard vs ethernet bus cards

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Featur...rkDeviceNaming

Thank you! Now I understand. New naming convention that is suppose to make it easier to figure out what Ethernet port is what. Not sure how it is going to help, but what matters is that now I understand what is going on.

What really is going to help find the port, is the command in your above reference, which I really love: "ethtool -p port_name". Flashes the LED's on the port. Now that is going to really help figure who goes to who! (I use to guess with the ping command.)

One more question to go:
Unanswered still: why is here no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-p2p1 ?

Many thanks,
-T

[Speeddymon]

There is no p2p1 because NetworkManager is handling your connection and it puts the relevant config files in a different location.

A quick 'find /etc -iname "*p2p1*"' will reveal the location of the config files.

(Answering this old dead thread because of the 1/2 solved tag and because I found this on google.)

Note that using the boot commandline option biosdevname=0 will revert to the old way of doing things for NM as well... sorta.. After rebooting with that option, I now have '/etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-Wired_Connection_1' ... Meh, better than nothing I guess.

[shamino]

Originally Posted by ToddAndMargo

Thank you! Now I understand. New naming convention that is suppose to make it easier to figure out what Ethernet port is what. Not sure how it is going to help, but what matters is that now I understand what is going on.

For a typical desktop user where there is only one Ethernet port, it shouldn't make any difference. It's just a name.

Where it helps is when you've got a system with lots of ports on cards (like a big server.)

If a card fails and you swap it out for a new one, the port name shouldn't change. With the previous scheme, there was no guarantee. When a card gets swapped, the MAC address changes (so the HWADDR in the config file is useless) and it may use a different device driver (so the load-order may change.)

If you swap only one card, software could probably infer what to do by seeing that all but one config file has a HWADDR that matches hardware. But what if you're swapping multiple cards or if you're swapping a multi-port card? With the old scheme, there's no good way to avoid making the operator go through a time-consuming process of validating (and maybe re-assigning) device names after the upgrade.