wandering network inferfaces

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

I am having a small problem with the networking on the Debian Etch
system I have installed on my Fujitsu P7120 notebook...

The notebook has both wired and a wireless, with the wireless interface
sometimes showign up as eth1, and sometimes as eth2.

I just booted with /etc/network/interfaces specifying eth2 as the
device to be configured with DHCP, but it didn't work because
eth1 was the wireless interface. I edit the file to change
it to eth1 and reboot, and sure enough now the wireless
interface has changed to eth2 :-/
I change /etc/network/interfaces back and on my third attempt
am successful, but it is a bit of a tedious way to boot the system.

Does this indicate a problem, or have I omitted some aspect of
the configuration?

The output of iwconfig shows 4 lan interfaces, of which 3 are ethernet:
lo        no wireless extensions.

eth0      no wireless extensions.

eth1      no wireless extensions.

eth2      IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"Vitanuova1"  
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:11:09:9B:13:E7   
          Bit Rate=36 Mb/s   Tx-Power=20 dBm   
          Retry limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=78/100  Signal level=-50 dBm  Noise level=-72 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

sit0      no wireless extensions.

Looking at the boot time messages I gather the eth1 device is some form
of ethernet over firewire. I am not sure what sit0 is.

The network related output of dmesg is:
 8139cp: pci dev 0000:06:04.0 (id 10ec:8139 rev 10) is not an 8139C+ compatible c
 hip
 8139cp: Try the "8139too" driver instead.
 8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.27
 ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:06:04.0[A] -> GSI 20 (level, low) -> IRQ 209
 eth0: RealTek RTL8139 at 0x2000, 00:0b:5d:96:c6:d5, IRQ 209
 eth0:  Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8100B/8139D'
 eth1394: $Rev: 1312 $ Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>
 eth1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0)
 ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, git-1.0.8
 ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2005 Intel Corporation
 ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection
 eth2: no IPv6 routers present
 ipw2200: Unknown notification: subtype=40,flags=0xa0,size=40

Any ideas?

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                          digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com