Determine order of network interfaces

[Ketil Froyn]

Hi,

I have a computer with some network interfaces, and I am unable to determine which physical interface gets assigned to which ethX during boot.

Specifically, my problem is that the firewire driver suddenly started using eth1 instead of eth2 yesterday. It hadn't done this before, and I had to change my interfaces file as a result. The issue is that I want a normal interface to be on eth1, and I want to be certain that this never changes again. I have tried to edit /etc/modutils/aliases and added (near the top)

alias eth2 eth1394

but this didn't help at all (I remembered to run update-modules, and saw the added lines in /etc/modules.conf). Then I tried creating /etc/modprobe.conf, with the line

alias eth2 eth1394

and as a result I could remove all the network modules and successfully run "modprobe eth2", which had never worked before.However, the order was still wrong after rebooting, then eth2 was my normal ethernet interface, while eth1 had been "stolen" by the firewire driver again.

So now I wonder how I can force my debian system to let me specify which interfaces get which names during boot.

Cheers,
Ketil