Hello all-

I'm running FC5 (kernel 2.6.18-1.2257.fc5) on a Toshiba laptop. I've seen reference to this problem in other threads, but I was unable to find a solution.

My laptop has two cards: a regular cat5e connection, and a wireless card.

For FC5 and previous Linux distro installs (FC4 and others), the wired card has always come up as eth0.

For FC4 and previous distros, the wireless card was always identified as eth1.

However, since I've installed FC5, the wireless card is being given a new name on every boot (!). Instead of eth1, it's dev53418 or something (dev followed by 4-5 numbers).

The wirelss card works just fine, but the changing name makes it impossible for me to auto-configure the card at boot time.

Is there something I can do so that the wireless card is given a consistent device name on every boot?

Thanks-

-Thomas

As root: chkconfig --levels 345 kudzu off

Interesting. So perhaps hardware autodetection is causing this?

I've just tried that (chkconfig --levels 345 kudzu off) and rebooted a few times. I'm still getting a random device name for my wireless card (devXXXXX).

I've verified that kudzu is off:

# chkconfig --list kudzu
kudzu 0ff 1ff 2ff 3ff 4ff 5ff 6ff

That looks off to me! But again, I'm still getting random device names.

Any other ideas? I'm not very familiar with how device names are assigned, but kudzu seemed like a likely culprit.

-Thomas

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this. I remember reading something a while ago (over a year) on this and the fix. I'm trying to find it again. If this is a new installation then please update to the latest or if possible install FC6 and then update.

this is usually udev related i think. try deleting your persistent.net.rules file in /etc/udev/udev.d (this file is automatically generated at boot, i suggest you just move it out the way initially and try a boot or restart udev)

It turned out to be a problem with the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts files.

I'm not sure why, but FC5 at some point (right after install) decided to flip the order or names of the network cards. At some point my wireless card had been eth0, now FC5 wanted to call it eth1.

The ifcfg-eth0 startup script referred to the wireless card as eth0, and I'm guessing this mismatch was causing the devXXXX device names.

Once I swapped my ifcfg-eth0/1 files, the wireless card was properly named on boot (eth1 now). And as a result, I can configure it at boot time automatically.

Obviously a bug somewhere at boot. But there is a simple workaround (assuming the kernel doesn't want to keep flipping the names).

Actually, it was a dumber problem: I had a bad MAC address in one of the ifcfg-ethX files.

Once I had the correct MAC address, it was properly named at boot. Whoops.