NIC naming

[Terje Elde]

> On 26 Oct 2015, at 17:30, Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> This probably doesn't solve your problem, which appears to be knowing
> which of the ethernet ports on your machine is em0 -- the usual method
> to do that is by ifconfig'ing everything else down and then testing with
> a network cable until you find the working port.  However it might help
> clarify the system configuration.

ifconfig will give you the MAC of the card. I'm not sure if there's a standard tool for it, but it should be easy to do something like "rename the card with MAC address X to Y"

Personally, I've started renaming along the lines of renaming em0 to em_lan0, em1 to em_wan1 and so on. Makes it a bit easier to see what's going on, both for when another admin might inherit the box, and also for myself, if I haven't touched the box in a few years. 

Sure, you could argue all of this should be documented somewhere as well - and you wouldn't be wrong - but renaming makes things obvious where the next admin will look, not just in some doc that might be somewhere he didn't. 

Terje