Dapper networking appears to be totally hosed

[Daniel L. Miller]

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> Help me out here, people. I'm running Dapper, and I think
> the recent switch to udev for networking (that's what
> happened, right?) has totally hosed things.
>
> First, my NICs are constantly changing back and forth:
> sometimes the wireless is eth1 and sometimes it's eth0. I
> suppose this depends on the order in which they come up, but
> it shouldn't, right: I thought that's what iftab(5) and
> ifrename(8) were all about; since my NICs' MAC addresses
> are listed in /etc/iftab, I thought my NICs' names would
> always be the same. The only times they seem to change are
> when Ubuntu is going through big changes, as it was during
> Breezy development and as it is now for Dapper.
>
> More importantly by far, I keep losing network connectivity
> -- either I'm getting knocked totally offline, or I'm
> getting such slow performance that it just *looks* like
> nothing is happening; I can't tell. If I then do an
> ifdown/ifup, I get back online for a short time. Then the
> connection dies again. I've not followed it up, but I think
> it may be the case that doing
>
> 1) ifdown
> 2) ifup
> 3) start downloading a very large file
>
> will keep me online for longer: it's as though the large
> file's download is holding something open that would
> otherwise have closed.
>
> So what's going on? Why does networking appear to be totally
> screwed?
>
>   
Couple ideas:

1.  Just in case, go ahead and force your cards to be specific device 
addresses.  I've never used iftab/ifrename, but I've set the MAC 
addresses in /etc/network/interfaces for my firewall, as in:
auto eth1
iface eth1 inet static
    address 192.168.0.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    broadcast 192.168.0.255
    network 192.168.0.0
    hwaddress ether 00:01:02:03:0D:77

etc.

2.  Is your address static or DHCP?  If DHCP, what client are you using?

-- 
Daniel