i'm running Redhat 9 on my laptop. i had been using an internal ethernet card to get on the LAN here at school, and an external usb-based ethernet card w/ a crossover cable to route another computer (actually, an xbox running a version of debian called xebian) using NAT onto the lan as well. this functioned fine for more than a week. suddenly, Redhat no longer recognizes the internal ethernet card. the external card (formerly eth1) seems to now be associated w/ eth0, and it says it can't find a device for eth1.
my system is dual boot. if i boot into Windows XP Professional, it can find and use both ethernet cards just fine. redhat will allow me to get online using the external ethernet only. if i boot into PCLinuxOS 4 (
www.pclinuxonline.com), a live cd distro based on Mandrake, it finds and initializes both cards w/out a problem.
from PCLinuxOS, using ifconfig, i can see that the hardware address (MAC) for my internal card is "00:90:f5:0d:0d:68" and the address for the external one is "00:10:60:c2:94:4f" so, back in redhat, eth1 is bound to the address for the external card. however, i understand that if eth0 isn't present, eth1 shifts down to it, hence eth0 now initializes as the external card. (is this correct?) somehow, eth0 is no longer bound to a MAC address (it used to be). so i tried binding it to what i know is the correct address. didn't work. hit the "probe" button, no device found w/ that address. when creating or editing these devices, i gives me a list of devices to use, namely two of them. however, even when associated w/ the first device (i.e. the internal card i've had all along) any error messages always refer to the second device (i.e. the external card recently attached to facilitate packet-forwarding for the xbox).
at this point i'm thoroughly puzzled. i need to resolve this in order to continue to use this linux distro. i really, really don't want to go back to using windows (this is actually the first time i've booted into it in a couple months) and a live cd distro of linux, while cool and useful, doesn't suffice for my needs. even if you can't give me a solution, any insight i might be able to use in my own tinkering would be greatly appreciated.
