When laptop is docked, eth0 moves from pcmcia to docking station nic (both work wth same driver)

When laptop is docked, eth0 moves from pcmcia to docking station nic (both work wth same driver)

[Buddy Lumpkin]

Hello All,
 
I don't know exactly where to look to solve this problem, so im posting
here.
 
I have a laptop with a 3com PCMCIA NIC and a 3com NIC built into a
docking station. When I dock my laptop, eth0 becomes the docking station
NIC. I just want to know where to look to be able to control which
device becomes which device. Im used to Solaris where a path_to_inst
file correlates a device path to an instance number and device links are
made accordingly. Does Linux have a similar capability?
 
I wouldn't care so much about this, but vmware acts flaky if you have a
bridge on both eth0 and eth1 when eth1 disappears.
 
Thanks in advance,
 
--Buddy

Re: When laptop is docked, eth0 moves from pcmcia to docking station nic (both work wth same driver)

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 17:17, Buddy Lumpkin wrote:
> I have a laptop with a 3com PCMCIA NIC and a 3com NIC built into a
> docking station. When I dock my laptop, eth0 becomes the docking station
> NIC. I just want to know where to look to be able to control which
> device becomes which device. Im used to Solaris where a path_to_inst
> file correlates a device path to an instance number and device links are
> made accordingly. Does Linux have a similar capability?

You can ask for the MAC or PCI address of an interface, and you can
rename interfaces if you wish. The Red Hat 8.0 scripts are one example
that supports this

RE: When laptop is docked, eth0 moves from pcmcia to dockingstation nic (Linux needs path_to_inst)

[Buddy Lumpkin]

>You can ask for the MAC or PCI address of an interface

Where do I do this? 


, and you can
>rename interfaces if you wish. The Red Hat 8.0 scripts are one example
>that supports this

I don't need to rename them, I need them to stay put, or have some kind
of control over which NIC becomes eth0 and which NIC becomes eth1.

This makes me wonder about running Linux on large systems. How do you
make sure that if you have 2 NICS and you populate PCI slots 3 and 2,
what happens when you add another NIC in slot 0? Do the devices shift?
How do you get them to stay put?

What about SCSI cards? Does logical volume manager software tolerate
LUNS moving around when SCSI interfaces shift?

It seems there needs to be better control over this, something like
path_to_inst in Solaris?

--Buddy