If you and/or your distribution accidentally or incidentally loaded modules in
the wrong order (which may happen in e.g. parallel-running boot scripts), you
suddenly have eth0 as eth1. Or, when you changed the PCI slots (i.e. swapped
cards around), eth0 would also suddenly become a different one. There never
*were* days when eth0 remained eth0 across such changes.
In Linux, the user recognizes he got himself a new mainboard,
e.g. when the IDE chip changed and the new module is not in the initrd.
Jan
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