[vox-tech] Re: FireWire and Ethernet Confusion on Debian

[Ken Bloom]

On 8/31/05, Marc Elliot Hall <marc at hallmarc.net> wrote:
> 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.

On my kubuntu system, kubuntu automatically installed ifrename for me
which keeps track of this.

bloom at little-cat-a:~$ apt-cache show ifrename
Package: ifrename
Priority: extra
Section: net
Installed-Size: 108
Maintainer: Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: wireless-tools
Version: 27-1ubuntu1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libiw27 (>= 27)
Filename: pool/main/w/wireless-tools/ifrename_27-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
Size: 42070
MD5Sum: f2a653c9973684a83e28d8d21456743d
Description: Rename network interfaces based on various static criteria
 Ifrename allow the user to decide what name a network interface will have.
 Ifrename can use a variety of selectors to specify how interface names match
 the network interfaces on the system, the most common selector is the
 interface MAC address.
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu
Task: kubuntu-base

bloom at little-cat-a:~$ cat /etc/iftab
# This file assigns persistent names to network interfaces.  See iftab(5).
eth0 mac 00:c0:9f:b2:ff:35


--Ken Bloom