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

[Marc Elliot Hall]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 11:40:08AM -0500, Ken Bloom wrote:
> 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. 

<snipped config>

> > 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.
> 
<snipped package description> 

> 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

This seems to be a more elegant solution than disabling
Ethernet-over-FireWire altogether. (One never knows when one might need
the odd protocol!) 

Thanks for the tip, Ken!

> --Ken Bloom

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