Hi,

Anyone knows the difference between the NAME and the DEVICE when i run 'nmcli connection'?

can i change the NAME to anything I want and it wont effect any best practice? and when I need to stop or restart interfaces do i call them with their NAME or DEVICE?

Hi,

DEVICE is what is file in the /dev folder, such as eth1 in /dev/eth0.

NAME can be whatever you want. But default for the first automatically configured connection nmcli set NAME to the same value as DEVICE.
I have never really tried to rename an existing connection.
I usually create an new one (pointing to the same device), and delete the old one.
You can also try to nmcli con edit, or nmcli con mod, or even nmcli con clone.

thank you for the information. Do you think it is possible to change the device name?

Hi,

Yes, theoretically it is possible to change the device name.
But for which real purpose? You really rarely need that.
Maybe, if you tell us what problem you are trying to solve, we might be able to propose a more suitable solution.

That said, you should bear in mind that the device names under /dev/devicename are managed by the kernel.
So I would not advise in changing or modifying the way the kernel thought it should have named a device.
But playing with udev rules (I have done it once and long time ago for a USB drive), you can add alias device names for your network interface with names of your choice.

You can change a connection name with nmcli by editing the connection.id field, eg:

thank you;

i used this:

nmcli connection modify ens224 connection.id net.hb

Ok understood. Alias is an option.

Oh its nothing; just an OC problem where in one of your 10 servers didn't get the same device name as the others and we wanted to find a way to fix that without having to reinstall linux.