After two replacement chassis in quick succession (timekeeping problems, followed by blown power supply), one of my machines was showing its two ethernet ports as eth4 and eth5. This probably isn’t an issue in and of itself*, but if I ever have to do stuff manually with the ethernet ports I don’t want to have to remember that they’re nonstandard.
A little digging (specifically, grep -R eth /etc/*) revealed that this gets set in /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules, so I edited it to take out the old eth* MAC addresses and relabel the new ones. Unfortunately, restarting udev didn’t make the change happen, so I had to reboot.
* I thought it was, because I couldn’t get either port to come up, hence discovering the above. However, after fixing that it still wouldn’t work — turned out that the cable was out at the other end. Always check the obvious stuff first! At least I learnt something.
those persistent udev rules are one of the things which annoys me about etch. We actually remove that config file entirely. Since VMware randomly generates MAC addresses unless you find the non obvious way to stop that behaviour.
This is one of those deals that cries out for a nice checkbox-style user interface. I appreciate that the major distributions ship with a comprehensive and useful default udev ruleset, but making any kind of changes means digging into udev scripts, and I can think of funner ways to spend time :)
I keep thinking that maybe I should look further into udev! Maybe next year...
Does the /etc/iftab file still work?
joelol75 - doesn't exist on current Debian systems, it would seem.