[plug] Installing new hardware the 'Debian' way.

[Graham, Alan A.]

Disclaimer: total Debian newbie.

After months of listening to you lot going on at some length about how great
debian is, I decided to install it on my firewall as part of a revamp of my
network.  Everything's gone well, except for the network cards.

It's recognised the RT8139, and installed it as eth0, exactly as I want, but
it doesn't recognise either of the other two.  After booting, I can
"modprobe eth1 tulip" and "modprobe eth2 eepro100", and then everything's
hunky dory.  Of course this doesn't stand a reboot.

I worked out that I'm not supposed to update the /etc/aliases file directly
in debian, but instead use the update-config script (apologies if I'm
getting the names wrong, I'm not in front of a real system at the moment).
I did that, to no effect.  The interesting bit is that the aliases includes
the line alias eth0 off.  Yet eth0 works from first boot.  There's obviously
something basic about the debian boot that I'm missing.

I confess to being hamstrung by my lack of understanding of the "Debian
Way"(tm).  While I'd normally just hack and burn my way through the startup
scripts, I'd prefer to do this 'right', just in case I screw it to the
extent that the apt-get of security upates fails to work.  That was the main
rationale for debian on the firewall.  Apart from an excuse to play, of
course.

So...  What's the "Debian Way" to install new hardware?  Should I take the
easy way out and install the linuxconf package (I've installed a bare
minimum at the moment)?  Is there a debian equivalent to linuxconf that I
should be using?

Regards

Alan