I am having a problem with a server at work,

the server came with a built in ethernet card that cannot be disabled in the bios. This card is dropping the connection all the time, so I decided to install a second card and use that one to connect to the network.
the problem is that the second car I installed is listd unde eth1 and the bad card et0. When I run netconfig to set a static IP, that IP gets assigned to ETH0.

How can I force the system to assign a static IP to ETH1 (I tried netconfig ETH1 with no luck).
I though all this info was kept under /etc/hosts but only 127.0.0.1 is listed in that file. What file holds that info?

please help.........
thank you

you didn't specify a distro...
since you mention netconfig, I'll assume it's slackware.
Card configuration is stored in:
/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf

Try:

ifconfig eth1 [ipaddress]

thank you for the quick reply,

the distro is RH8.1

Did you do the ifconfig?

Yes and it worlked until I reboot....I will have to add it to the bashrc file.
still wonderiing where RH8.1 keeps the static IP settings

thank you for all the help

I think it has to be added to
/etc/rc.d/rc.local

If you can gather information on the irq and base address of the 2 ethernet interfaces, you could use the reserve boot option to manually switch the assignment of eth0 and eth1.

These options have this form. The values will be different for you.
reserve=0x300,32 ether=0,0x300,eth1
reserve=0x340,32 ether=0,0x340,eth0

Or maybe, using the reserve option to disable probing of your on-board ethernet device would be enough.

thank you for all the help, this forum and all it members made possible for me to switch from WIndows to Linux. thank you