wireless on either eth1 or eth2

[Derrick Hudson]

On 12/31/05, Daniel Robitaille <robitaille at gmail.com> 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.

Network interfaces (and sockets) are not represented as files in /dev.
 I don't think udev has any effect on this, ifrename can control the
interface names.

>  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.

It sounds like Flight (whatever that is) provides a "virtual"
interface.  I'd wager that the eth1 vs eth2 name assignments is
dependent on the order the kernel becomes aware of the physical
network adapter and the virtual one provided by Flight.

Give ifrename a try.  After installing the package, look through 'man
iftab' and create a suitable /etc/iftab file.

-D