ethernet card, the debian way ?

[Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net>]

A few days ago, communication with one of the Debian computers on my
LAN became unreliable. Rsync transfers were interrupted with an error
message about the MAC address changing. After a visual inspection and
moving a few cables, the problem did not go away, so I added a lan
card to the box and gave it a second ethernet port. When I rebooted,
the messages during boot indicated that something had discovered the
new hardware, and that eth1 was being renamed eth0. When boot was
complete, the system worked and I have not seen the error message
about MAC address since.

But ... the eth1/eth0 switch took some extra time during boot, which
is slow enough already. When I rebooted again for another reason, the
delay was still there.

What is the "Debianly Correct" way to tell the software that the built
in ethernet hardware on the motherboard is to be ignored? And have it
go directly to setting up a LAN connection on the add-on LAN card?
Since I think I have good reason to believe that the built-in has gone
bad, I would like to have it skipped over during all setup. How?  I
can't exactly remove it. It seems to be soldered in place.

TIA

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net