Slightly OT: Setting the primary NIC

[Sven Riedel <sr@gimp.org>]

Hi,
I'm struggeling with a problem on a multi-homed host running debian, and
as the problem is somewhat security related, I hope you'll tolerate the
question on this list :)

Anyway, the Host has an internal NIC and an external NIC (acting among
other things as a firewall). For some reason, all services think the
external NIC is the primary, and will try to bind to that/all requests
from samba/cups etc have a source IP from the external NIC, which
complicates the setups of the internal hosts.
I've tried switching the order in which the modules for the NICs are
loaded (eth0 became eth1 and vice versa), the order in which the NICs
are activated with ifup and some other things, to no avail. I haven't
found anything at the debian site wrt this problem either - all I can
say is that the old distribution on the machine didn't have this
problem (but that was the only saving grace of that distro). 

Can anyone tell me how I can tell the machine which NIC is the primary?

Regs,
Sven
-- 
Sven Riedel                      sr@gimp.org
Liebigstr. 38 
30163 Hannover                  "Python is merely Perl for those who
                                 prefer Pascal to C" (anon)