On Sun, 13 Jan 2008, John Summerfield wrote: > man ifrename > man ifrename > man ifrename ... snip ... > Rebooting is the easy way to get HAL or whatever to scan the PCI bus > and load drivers. Probably, starting whatever in /etc/init.d would > have done as well, but rebooting is orderly and supposedly > repeatable and most likely to be correct. > > Once the drivers are loaded, "ifconfig -a" identifies the devices' > names that they have chosen. > > I suspect that when drives are being enumerated asynchronously, the > names they actually get might be a little random, especially when > there are two or more identical drives (think two PCI network cards > with the same realtek chips). > > Note too, that these days it's possible for users (eg RPD) to rename > devices. at the risk of flogging this beyond recognition (too late!), what i still don't understand is what information i *lost* in deleting those interfaces that i would need "ifrename" to recover. at the moment, i'm installing F8 Unity 64 on an identical laptop, then i'll add the "b43" driver and get wireless working, then i'll reboot a time or two to verify what the interfaces look like. in short, get it up and running just like the old system. at that point, i want to make a record of all the salient information regarding interfaces and how they're configured and activated, and try the same experiment again (deleting the interfaces), just to see what changes, and why it's so hard to get eth0 back again. i'm reluctant to use ifrename since it uses /etc/iftab, and the man page for iftab clearly states: "It is discouraged to try to map interfaces to default interfaces names such as eth0, wlan0 or ppp0." which is, of course, exactly what i would be doing. i just want to know why i can't put back, the way it was before, the interface information i deleted, or if that's even possible. i realize that deleting your network interfaces is not something you would normally do, but if it happens, shouldn't it still be fixable? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA Home page: http://crashcourse.ca Fedora Cookbook: http://crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/Fedora_Cookbook ========================================================================
