docking a laptop - eth0
 

I am running Red Hat 8.0 on my Dell Latitude C610 laptop
with Dell Latitude C/Port II docking station.
When I dock my laptop, the NIC of my docking station is listed as eth1
and my internal NIC for laptop is listed as eth0.

I would like ëth0 to point to the internal NIC when undocked and point to the NIC of docking station , when docked.

How to do this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I think you can do this by editing /boot/System.map or creating an alternative but I can't swear to it.

Can you please tell me how to do that? What should I edit in /boot/System.map..I have never looked into this file?
Should I modify something there? Please help me

System.map is created when you compile a kernel - it lists the devices and the names that linux knows them by.

I'm not actually sure if you are supposed to edit it directly. From what I have read in the past - I *assume* that you can just swap the device names and map them to different names.

I'm afraid that this isn't my forte so I'll not be able to help you much further.

I sympathize.

I have a setup very similar with the added headache of a mini-pci wireless card which also shows up as an ethX. The X dependent on when the pcmcia initializes with respect to the network.

I haven't yet found a way to force an identifier on to a specific resource yet, and can't see how it could be done in the System.map.

I have however found many workarounds for dealing with the alternate position (naming) of my wireless card.

If you can tell us what it is you are trying for. I might can help there.

For instance, if it's the annoyingly long time it takes for eth0 to die out on the boot up so that eth1 (the dock) can initialize. You can fix this by having both delay booting (changing ONBOOT="NO" in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX) and then scripting your own init.d script to load after the network script. What I've done in my init.d script is to check to see if the dock is present and then initialize the proper ethX accordingly.
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Hope this helps!!!