On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 08:08:17PM -0500, Mike Pelley wrote:
> Feico Dillema wrote:
> 
> > I think it is historical, combined with having no reason to change it.
> > Having your ehterhnet interface called eth0 consistently, has only
> > advantages on desktop machines with only a single ethernet card.
> 
> Is that not reason enough?  It would be very nice to be able to swap a 
> failing ethernet card with a replacement with a different chipset 
> without having to edit several files in /etc.
> 
> Ideally, you could swap out an ethernet card in a box with multiple 
> cards and not have it's number change, which would allow one to fix a 
> hardware problem without editing files (good for 3rd party remote data 
> centre fixes).  I'm not sure how cards are numbered on different arch's, 
> however, so this may not be a practical goal.
I think that can and should be fixed by making /etc/rc/netowrk more
`intelligent'. It, like most things, can be solved by adding a level
of indirection. The startup scripts could be modified to use a
ifconfig.0 for whatever ethernet interface it finds.

I regularly swap cards in my laptop; regular ether and
wavelan. Sometimes I use both at the same time.
In such case it is very nice to be able to have two
/etc/ifconfig.ifn, which do the right thing for different type of
cards (setting media options and such). Anyway, with IPv6 and its
auto address config, you typically don't need anything in interface
specific configuration (especially since rtsol now can autoscan for
interfaces!). Same counts for IPv4 with use of recent dhclient to
configure whatever interface is there.

Feico.