What determines the order of ethernet devices?

[David G. Miller]

Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

> One issue that occurred when going from FC-5 to FC-6 on my desktop was 
> that the order of the 3 ethernet devices changed. This didn't really 
> cause a problem; I simply permuted the files 
> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth[012]. But I wondered: 1. What 
> caused this change? 2. Is there any simple way of ensuring that a 
> given device is say eth0? 
You can use the HWADDR parameter in each ifcfg-eth[012] file to specify 
the MAC address of the corresponding NIC.  This keeps things stable 
during normal operations. 

If the cards are all the same, this situation can be a real bear during 
installation.  I guess that's a benefit to going gigabit for my internal 
network.  I left my "external card" as a 10/100 since that's plenty fast 
enough to deal with the data rate from my ISP.

Cheers,
Dave

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Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
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