[plug] no eth0, but drivers load...

[Daniel Pittman]

Lucas van Staden <lvs at dedmeet.com> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Lucas van Staden <lvs at dedmeet.com> writes:
>>
>>> I have an old compaq evo N400 laptop, which I had turned into a
>>> picture frame a few years back.  Today I decided to revamp it a bit,
>>> (new frame, new install)
>>>
>>> Part of the process was to remove DSL and go with Debian R4.
>>>
>>> When booting, the system detects the onboard ethernet, and load the
>>> e100 driver, which reports the card is fine (calls it eth0), and gives
>>> the mac address, and irq however, there is no eth0 device available,
>>> only lo.
>>
>> Does the eth0 device show up if you run 'ifconfig -a' as root?
>
> Thank you, ifconfig -a show it as eth2, strange as the dmesg of the
> driver loading names it as eth0, so I have been looking only for eth0,
> and I did try eth1, but not eth2

*nod*  The next step is to install (I suggest) NetworkManager, or
otherwise configure the device through /etc/network/interfaces.

The reason you don't see it normally is that it just isn't configured,
so isn't shown by default with ifconfig.

> But now thinking about it, it does make sense, as the thinkpad laptop
> has eth0 (wired), and eth1 (wireless), thus the 'new' nic on the
> pictureframe will be eth2

Correct: these days Debian and derivatives are careful to avoid *ever*
giving the same device name to a new NIC, to reduce surprises.

> Anyone know what I must edit to move it back to eth0, just a nice to
> have, not crucial.

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Remove the obsolete eth0 entry, and replace 'eth2' with 'eth0' for the
new NIC, and you should be good to go after a reboot.

(I don't actually know how to rename the NIC without a reboot any more.
 Isn't that kind of sad?  It used to be ifrename or similar, but they
 have gone away and I don't know how to trigger udev to reprocess the
 rule and rename the device for me.)

Regards,
        Daniel