In Ubuntu 16+, for a network interface "ens192", where does the "192" come from?

It is done in Linux, to avoid name confusion for the NICS. All NICs are named based on the PCI SLOT number they are using

for PCI it would be

  • ens33,ens34.....

On the other hand for NICs using PCIe slot would be having (notice for PCIe slots there is an increase of 32 for each NIC)

  • ens160,ens192,....

While I don't know why they are the ensXX format, if you want to disable them to have consistent naming across servers and get the legacy ethX, you'll want to set the net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 kernel boot arguments in GRUB or your bootloader in general.