People like consistent device names, and one of the ways that Unixes have historically tried to get them is to keep a local database of known devices and their names, based on some sort of fingerprint of the device (the MAC address is a popular fingerprint for Ethernet interfaces, for example). Over the years various Unixes have implemented this in different ways; for example, some versions of Linux auto-created udev rules for some devices, and Solaris and derivatives have /etc/path_to_inst. Unfortunately, I have to tell you that trying to get consistent device names this way turns out to be a bad idea.

The fundamental problem is that if you keep a database of local device names, your device names depend on the history of the system. This has two immediate bad results. First, if you have two systems with identical hardware running identical software they won't necessarily use the same device names, because one system could have previously had a different hardware configuration. Second, if you reinstall an existing system from scratch you won't necessarily wind up with the same device names, because your new install won't necessarily have the same history as the current system does.

(Depending on the scheme, you may also have the additional bad result that moving system disks from one machine to an identical second machine will change the device names because things like MAC addresses changed.)

Both of these problems are bad once you start dealing with multiple systems. They make your systems inconsistent, which increases the work required to manage them, and they make it potentially dangerous to reinstall systems. You wind up either having to memorize the differences from system to system or needing to assemble your own layer of indirection on top of the system's device names so you can specify things like 'the primary network interface, no matter what this system calls it'.

Now, you can have this machine to machine variation problems even with schemes that derive names from the hardware configuration. But with such schemes, at least you only have these problems on hardware that's different, not on hardware that's identical. If you have truly identical hardware, you know that the device names are identical. By extension you know that the device names will be identical after a reinstall (because the hardware is the same before and after).

I do understand the urge to have device names that stay consistent even if you change the hardware around a bit, and I sometimes quite like them myself. But I've come to think that such names should be added as an extra optional layer on top of a system that creates device names that are 'stateless' (ie don't care about the past history of the system). It's also best if these device aliases can be based on general properties (or set up by hand in configuration files), because often what I really want is an abstraction like 'the network interface that's on network X' or 'the device of the root filesystem'.