Re: Can a particular network card be permenantly bound to an eth'x'number?

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

rich <stantonrj@cf.ac.uk> wrote:

|> I have several network cards in my laptop - wired lan, wireless lan,
|> loopback & firewire.  After a recent update (I'm running testing) my
|> interface numbers all jumped around so that instead of the wired lan
|> being eth0, it's now eth1 & the firewire is eth0.  What defines what
|> eth'x' number is given to which network device?  It's a pain having to
|> change configuration each time they move numbers (as also happens
|> depending on whether I boot with my wireless cardbus in the slot or
|> not)!

This is just what the ifrename package is for (part of wireless-tools
but it's a separate package in Debian).

It assigns a user-defined interface-name permanently on the basis of
certain static criteria, usually the device's MAC address.

I use it on my laptop to ensure that the built-in ethernet adapter
is always `nic', one wireless card is always `wlan1', and the second
wireless card is always `wlan2'.

It's easy to set this up, but if you want a really good detailed
account of this and related issues, try:

   http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/HOTPLUG.txt

Jim