Matching devices with the corresponding interfaces

If you define multiple interfaces on a Linux instance, you must keep track of the interface names assigned to your network devices.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP4 uses udev to track the network interface name and preserves the mapping of interface names to network devices across IPLs.

How to keep track of the mapping differs depending on the network device driver. For qeth, you can use the lsqeth command to obtain a mapping.

After setting a device online, read /var/log/messages or issue dmesg to find the associated interface name in the messages that are issued in response to the device being set online.

For each network device that is online, there is a symbolic link of the form /sys/class/net/<interface>/device where <interface> is the interface name. This link points to a sysfs directory that represents the corresponding network device. You can read this symbolic link with readlink to confirm that an interface name corresponds to a particular network device.