Hi all,

Short version:

I have two NICs on my PC. How can I force which one is mapped to eth0 and which one is mapped to eth1?

Long version:

I have recently installed SuSE 8.2 as an alternate OS to Win2K. On Win2K, I have been using the Linksys wirless WMP11 v2.7, but as this is unsupported in Linux, I have added a second Netgear NIC for Linux.

The trouble is, linux has decided that the WMP11 card should be eth0, and that the Netgear is eth1.

This means that during boot up, eth0 fails to initialise, which means that eth1 is ignored, which means that I get no network interface other than lo.

For the short term, I have just been restating the network once logged in, which brings up the Netgear as eth0, and everything works fine. Of course, I'd rather this happened automatically.

Does anyone know how I can switch things around so that linux considers the netgear as eth0 and the WMP11 as eth1?

The wire-based Netgear NIC is a short-term solution until I decide what I am going to do about my unsupported WMP11, so I would rather not remove the WMP11 as the solution to my problem.

Thanks in advance,
Michael

I will try here...Newbie myself...

It is my understanding that Linux addresses/identifies the NIC as eth0,1, .... based upon the IRQ assigned to the slot in which it is inserted and further by the BIOS addressing the IRQ to that slot ...

- Miron

nope wrong
the first network card identified is automatically eth0 by order of the kernel, secodn is then eth1 and so on

only way to set which is first is to make the network card drivers into modules and then load the driver fopr the card you want to be eth0 first then load the other, but this does not work if you have 2 identical cards. for instance a 3com and a realtek, you load the driver of the oen you want to be eth0 first

you can set this in the startup files, which files depends on distro, I am not a suse guy and I am also not familiar with modules.conf as I load modules another hacked way.

I managed to do it when I was using redhat by adding the line

HWADDR=mac_address_of_interface

in the appropriate ifcfg file, and entries in modules.conf although it involved alot of messing around to get it thus as it had already been detecting them the way it normally does.

Or maybe I just got lucky

Thanks for all the replies.

I thought that there may be a simple way to do it, but it looks like it is more complicated than I thought.

In the end, I just removed the configuration for the WMP11, so that Linux does not even try to bring it up. This way, my Netgear NIC gets to be eth0, and everything works fine.

I guess this is the best solution for now, since the WMP11 isn't supported anyway, and it's probably good not to have it half configured on my system. At least I didn't have to physically unplug it, which is what I wanted to avoid having to do.

Thanks again,
Michael