Happy Xmas + New Year to you all - I have been away for a while and sadly been stuck with an Win XP only box. It's frightening how quick I've forgotten my new found Linux skills ! Anyway - to get to the point.... I'm now back on my Slackware machine (Slackware 11, 2.6 kernel) which has both an inbuilt (Intel 82815 motherboard) ethernet adapter and a Belkim wireless ethernet adapter card. Problem is the wireless card seems to be randomly assigned to eth0 or eth1, and when it's set up as eth0 I can't get internet access (I'm not concerned about this as my internet connection of choice is the wired one and I couldn't be bothered messing with the WAP settings in Slack just now! So it seems that when my inbuilt ethernet adapter is given eth0 and the wireless card eth1, DHCP kicks in successfully and all is well, vice versa and I'm stuck !! However this is pretty random across reboots and sometimes my wireless card gains eth0 and my wired connection eth1 - which I don't want ! Do I have to give a udev rule to prioritize these two devices ? I.E can I dictate which ethernet adapter is set to eth0 ? Perhaps I'm assuming wrong about this problem and maybe udev has nothing to do with it. Cheers and all the best.....

I can think of two things:

1) find the module that's providing the support for the wireless card, and disable it.

2) figure out how linux sets up the eth0 and eth1 aliases. I believe it's in /etc/modules.conf, the details of which are very system dependent. Can anyone else explain how those aliases are set up? Can't you have your nic named 'foobar1' if you wanted?

Bloody hell that was a quick reply ! Thanks - I was under the impression that modules.conf was only addressed by modprobe - am I wrong ? Anyway disabling the module responsible for the wireless card is a nice piece of lateral thinking - thanks for that. It would be interesting to see what dictates the handing out of eth0/eth1 device aliases..

Check "/etc/udev/rules.d/network-devices.rules". You will have to edit this file. Instructions are provided. You can name them any way you prefer.
Regards,
Bill

Thanks a lot for that - I've just edited my "network-devices.rules" file to say :-
Haven't tested it yet as its a random problem but it just looks right - thanks a lot. BTW - I am interested in the files in this directory - particulary libsane.rules - any pointers as to where I can study these settings and udev behaviour ? Thanks again...

Sure. Try recent-state-of-udev & writing_udev_rules.
Regards,
Bill

Thank you, thank you - I've only just scanned the pages you linked to but they seem to supply the kind of in depth info I was looking for ! Obviously I have spent time with our "friend" Google but precise relevant pointers as you have just supplied are superb - much appreciate it... Happy New Year...

Just to close this thread - after editing my "network-devices.rules" as per instructions, all is well - thankyou very much....