On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 03:04:00 CDT, Rob Landley said:
quoted text
> I note that the eth0 and eth1 names are dynamically assigned on a first come
> first serve basis (like scsi).  This never causes me a problem because the
> driver loading order is constant, and once you figure out that eth0 is
> gigabit and eth1 is the 80211g it _stays_ that way across reboots, reliably.
> Yeah, it's a heuristic.  Hands up everybody relying on such a heuristic in
> the real world.

I've gotten burned by that heuristic enough times to not rely on it.  My last
laptop had an ethernet on the motherboard, a *separate* ethernet in the docking
station, an ethernet on a multifunction pcmcia card (I usually just used the
modem side), and a wireless that looked like an ethernet - so it was possible
for a given interface to be eth1 (if no dock and no pcmcia card) or eth3 (if
both were present).  And that's on a laptop from almost 5 years ago.

And then there's the recent Sun and Dell 1U rack-mounts that have 4 ethernets
on the motherboard, and they *never* seem to assign in a 0,1,2,3 order that
matches the 0 1 2 3 printed above the 4 RJ45's ;)

So I have for years been a proponent of 'ethN is nailed by MAC address' :)