I have a computer system with 3 ethernet ports, one on the motherboard and two on a dual NIC PCI card.
Typically, the onboard port is aliased as eth0 while the ports on the NIC get assigned eth1 and eth2. Lately, eth1 gets assigned to the onboard port, which is very annoying since that messes up my connections to the internet and LAN subnets. I know this is a problem that many people have complained about when upgrading their kernel from 2.4.x to 2.5.x or 2.6.x. For some people this problem happens when they upgrade their hardware (as it did for me). I understand that one way to fix the naming of the interfaces is to use the nameif utility and store the static interface-to-mac mappings for my system in /etc/mactab. I've gotten this to work with trivial effort. So far so good. In the future, if I swap out my dual NIC with a newer one, I'd like a way to be able to produce the new mappings automatically. Perhaps I could do it like this for a port I want to call "eth1": 1- Connect ethernet loopback plug to port 2- Run my script, which does this: a. determine that I am trying to configure eth1 b. probe all ports to see which has loopback activity. c. store the mac addr of that port in mactab (along with eth1 tag) 3- Done. This is a simple self-calibration procedure. But I'm guessing somebody has some thoughts on how to better implement this. This will be especially useful to someone who is trying to ship a large number of computers pre-configured with Debian, and they want to ensure that eth0 is always the onboard port, eth1 is the left port on the dual nic, and eth2 is the right port on the dual nic, and so on. Any thoughts will be appreciated. Thanks, Salman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]