The university AND jstor were pretty quick to get as uninvolved from that mess as quick as possible, so it really doesn’t matter… But what you’re saying has nothing to do with the case and is also not true. “Broke and entered” implies forced physical access into a clearly forbidden area. The network closet was a room that was left unlocked and was frequently used by janitorial staff to put junk in.

As a data center engineer of 10+ years, I struggled to understand this at first. In my world, the hardware does a POST before the OS boots and has an inventory of what hardware components are available, so it shouldn’t matter in what order they are discovered, since the interface names should make a correlation between the interface and the pcie slot that NIC exists in.

Where the water gets muddled is in virtualized servers. The NICs no longer have a correlation to a specific hardware component, and you may need to configure different interfaces in the virtualized OS for different networks. I think in trying to create a methodology that is agnostic to bare metal/virtualized OSs, it was decided that the naming convention should be uniform.

Probably seems like bloat to the average admin who is unconcerned with whether these NICs are physical or virtual, they just want to configure their server.

Not trying to start an argument here but you sound very far removed from individual contributors, so maybe from your point of view it would simply look like adding it to a pile. More important than adding it to a pile is to make sure there’s systems in place to make sure OSs are patched. You wouldn’t be complaining to the IT/sysadmin guy about your servers’ vulnerability or patching schedules, you’d be talking to your cybersec department who’d have oversight. And if there’s a breach and your only defense is “I added it to the IT guys pile”, 100% you are getting fired as well.