What determines the order of ethernet devices?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 13:17 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Gilboa Davara 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?
> > 
> > AFAICS the order in which kudzu scanned the PCI bus dictates the order
> > of ethernet devices in ifcfg-ethX.
> 
> In this case kudzu must scan the PCI bus in a strange order,
> as the card which was given the eth0 slot appears as 00.09.0 on the bus
> (according to lspci) while the card given the eth1 slot
> appears as 00.07.0.
> 
> > 
> >> 2. Is there any simple way of ensuring that a given device is say eth0?
> > 
> > No that I'm aware of.
> 
> Actually, I found the advice to give the MAC address
> as HWADDRESS= in ifcfg-eth? did the job,
> as I should have said before.

Yep.
I usually just manually edit the ifcfg-ethX config files and set the
HWADDR/DEVICE by hand, forcing fedora to use -my- order.

- Gilboa