Re: Why eth1 and not eth0 ?

[Derek Broughton <auspex pointerstop ca>]

On Tuesday 23 January 2007 21:51, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-01-23 at 20:38 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> >>
> >> In which case, investigate whether iftab is available under your distro
> >> - it's used in Ubuntu to tie a MAC address to a specific interface. As
> >> Dan said, udev can assign the interface numbers apparently randomly (my
> >> eth0 & eth1 frequently exchange positions, but my network configuration
> >> is set up so as not to care).
> >
> > And that's the point; NM means you don't _need_ to care what the device
> > name is.  Really, you shouldn't ever need to look at it, nor care what
> > it's value is.  I don't tie my devices to MAC addresses, and they switch
> > around every now and again, but it doesn't matter to me as they always
> > do the right thing under NetworkManager.
>
> Sometimes it does make a difference, though, to other tools.  I have an
> annoying license manager for some commercial software that keys off the
> HWADDR of eth0.  

I agree.  It would be nice not to be tied to specific interface names, but 
it's not always an option, and I went to considerable effort to make other 
software play nice (e.g. fetchmail still doesn't behave as I would like - I 
would prefer it to work differently over wired or wireless, since I can't do 
that any more, I just make it behave as if it's always over the wireless 
link).
-- 
derek