[vox-tech] FireWire and Ethernet Confusion on Debian

[Marc Elliot Hall]

My little mini-ITX Via-based Debian box is giving me spasms today. It
seems that, on bootup, *sometimes* it finds an IEEE-1394 (AKA FireWire)
port before the RJ45 (AKA Ethernet) connector. Networking is provided by
Via Rhine II (in case there's a driver issue I don't know about). 

I'll spare you the gory details about dmesg | grep eth and so forth ;-)

This would be no big deal, except Debian wants to call the FireWire 
port ETH0 and assign it an IP address. Okay, I can work around that 
by assigning the Ethernet jack ETH1 and giving it a different address 
using ifdown, ifup, ifconfig, etc. This is a pain, particularly if I 
do an unattended reboot and can't SSH in. 

To make matters more confused, at other boot times, Debian ignores the 
FireWire port and gives the network jack ETH0 and an IP. 

Now, I'm not particularly well-versed in Debian's boot process; but I
*thought* that having an entry like this:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.5
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        broadcast 192.168.0.255
        gateway 192.168.0.1
        dns-nameservers 192.168.0.4 151.164.1.8 206.13.28.12
        dns-search hallmarc.net
        name Ethernet LAN card

in /etc/network/interfaces should make the appropriate startup scripts
find the network jack and assign it correctly. Obviously, I'm missing
something. 

What else, and where, should I have configured to make Debian stop
trying to run Ethernet-over-FireWire?


This guy: 
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/354537
had the same issue as I've got, and ended up with the same short-term
fix I discovered, but nothing permanent.

-- 
Marc Elliot Hall
621 River Moss Drive
St. Peters, MO 63376
www.hallmarc.net