wireless on either eth1 or eth2

[Derek Broughton]

Daniel Robitaille wrote:

>> > I have a Dell laptop using Dapper with both an internal wired card and
>> > a wireless card.  While the wired card always shows up as eth0, the
>> > wireless card shows up as either eth1 and eth2.  Which one of eth1 or
>> > eth2 it uses seems to change at nearly every reboot.
>> >
>> > While it's not really impacting the functionally of my laptop (except
>> > for the gnome-network applet; I currently keeps two in my panel, one
>> > or eth1 and one for eth2 to be sure I always have one that works by
>> > default), I find this curious, and I don't remember this happening in
>> > Breezy or earlier in the Dapper cycle.  I also uses netapplet, which
>> > may or may not be related to this.  Anyone has any insight of why my
>> > laptop is acting that way?
>>
>> While this hasn't personally happened to me, I've seen a couple of other
>> cases where it happened after udev upgrades.  You should be able to write
>> a udev rule to force it to eth1.
> 
> yes I could create a udev rule; and I could play with ifrename.  But
> part of me still think that if you have a laptop with 2 ethernet
> cards, you should only get by default eth0 and eth1, and not oscillate
> between eth0 and one of eth1 or eth2 between reboots.  Now that I
> think more about it, I think it started doing this after I installed
> Flight 2 from scratch on this laptop; while hoary/breezy/flight1 was
> always the eth0/eth1.  I wonder if something changed in udev between
> Flight 1 and Flight 2.

I can't say as I've just been dist-upgrading my system on a daily basis, but
udev has certainly been going through a lot of changes.  Somewhere between
breezy and current-dapper udev has taken over hotplug function - pretty
major.  You're right that the behaviour shouldn't change at each boot, but
I don't think you can guarantee that without a udev rule - so if you make
one that works, submit it to the maintainers :-)
-- 
derek