Most people commonly name their interface aliases as eth0:1, eth0:2, etc. Besides tradition, there is no reason for this naming scheme. The following are also accepted as valid eth0:hello, eth0:world, eth0:foobar However a problem occurs when you are using ifconfig to display the name of your interfaces. Ifconfig only displays the first 4 characters after the ':'. For example, the above names would be displayed as eth0:hell, eth0:worl, and eth0:foob Therefore, any attempts to further modify eth0:hell, eth0:worl, or eth0:foob will fail, because their real names are stored "internally" as eth0:hello, eth0:world, and eth0:foobar. You can still modify an alias by giving its full name, but you must remember what that full alias name was, since ifconfig will not display it properly. NOTE: Valid alias names may contain up to 16 characters after the ':'. To work properly, ifconfig should be able to display the full valid alias names.
This changes the layout of ifconfig more than a little to get room for those characters. Perhaps this should be taken up to the net-tools maintainer?
changing the layout of ifconfig's output is dangerous, who knows how many programs use it. leaving this for upstream to decide.
Closing as a won't fix as long as the upstream maintainers don't decide to change the original source. Read ya, Phil