forcing an interface to be athX

[David Vincent]

Nils Kassube wrote:

> Networkmanager works on a different layer than the interface names. If you 
> are using Ubuntu 7.10 the file /etc/iftab is no longer in use. Maybe 
> someone else can tell you how to set the association of interface name 
> and MAC address with udev. But if you have an earlier version of Ubuntu, 
> the following should work.

Yup, it has been fixed.  See Joel's reply.

> If you want the interfaces to get the names mentioned in /etc/iftab you 
> should reload the kernel modules for the interfaces. I don't know which 
> modules are in use, so I can't tell you the exact command. However it 
> would be something like this (if you have 3 different modules for the 3 
> diffenrent wifi cards):
> 
> sudo rmmod module1 module2 module3
> sudo modprobe module1
> sudo modprobe module2
> sudo modprobe module3
> sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
> 
> I'm not sure if the last command is necessary, but it doesn't hurt.
> 
> You can probably find out the real module name(s) with one of the 
> commands "lsmod" or "dmesg|grep ath".

Thanks for the help!  You give me way to much credit though.  I've only 
got one wifi card in the machine currently - not three.  Though I'm 
thinking of the possibilities now that you bring that up.

Here's the situation:  The machine had Gutsy installed while a usb wifi 
card was plugged in.  That adapter worked fine with the live cd but 
quickly proved flaky when the install was done.  So I installed a PCMCIA 
wifi card which gave a much more stable connection.  Then I found a 
minipci wifi card in my hardware collection and installed it to see if 
it would go.  It did and it has the best reception of all of them so I 
want to stick with it with no plans to ever use the other cards again.

Seeing my interface named ath2 bugs me and offends my sense of 
simplicity, so I wanted to force it to become ath0 and get in line with 
eth0 and wifi0.  :)  (Now that I look there is also lo here, wasn't it 
lo0 before?)

Cheers.

-d