Rohan Almeida’s Blog
Perl Developer. Linux Advocacy. Practicing Guitarist.

ifrename (8) is a handy utility to assign consistent names to your network interfaces

My IBM ThinkPad has two network interfaces - ethernet and wireless. I normally use the wireless interface (eth1), but at boot time which hardware device actually picks up which device name is quite random.

I configured my /etc/iftab as follows:

# cat /etc/iftab

eth0 driver e1000
eth1 driver ipw2200

and added the /sbin/ifrename line near the end of my /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

# tail -8 /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
# network inetface names should be constant
/sbin/ifrename

# Let rhgb know that we’re leaving rc.sysinit
if [ -x /usr/bin/rhgb-client ] && /usr/bin/rhgb-client –ping ; then
/usr/bin/rhgb-client –sysinit
fi

So now my wireless interface is always eth1

Tweet This Post  Facebook 

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.