Writing many network-related posts tonight, so I suppose this is as good a time as any for this...
I've been thinking lately about proposing to Red Hat an improvement to their initscripts WRT network devices. I think this will be best received if it's accompanied by well thought out logic, and a working implementation. Basically, I think the use of sequential device names in the network device config files is a bad idea. This same logic is what brought about devfs (which I really hope to see in use some day ;) Most of the time, PCI based systems won't have trouble with this configuration system. Not many people are going to add in an extra PCI NIC and possibly break their config by attaching the old settings to the new card, but it probably happens. However, this is more troublesome with PCMCIA based systems, which may contain more than one NIC, or may use different NIC's in different locations. For instance, my laptop contains a 3com PCMCIA NIC in addition to an Orinoco WaveLan card. I can not use the appropriate card for my location (NIC for work with no AP, Orinoco for home) because in either case, they'd simply be known as "eth0". So, I keep both cards installed at all times. However, that is not the answer to all problems either. When I wake the system from suspend, my wireless card doesn't start up automatically as I'd like it to. I hoped at one point to make this work by setting PCMCIARESTART="yes" in /etc/sysconfig/apmd, but I found that when the system resumed, the PCMCIA cards were given their device ID's in reverse. I originally had to remove the card and re-insert it to make it work, but I now have set PCMCIARESTART="yes" and PCMCIABIOSBUG="no" in /etc/sysconfig/apmd, and now can bring up a terminal and `/sbin/ifup eth1`. It's better than the constant wear on my PCMCIA contacts, but far from what I'd like. I think that the whole mess would be improved if devices were identified by their MAC address. I plan to rework initscripts and redhat-config-network to function this way to improve the situation. Before I propose a feature request to Red Hat, I thought I'd ask for input from other users. Does anyone see any problems that can't be overcome by such a switch? Would other users be in favor of this change? Is anyone else jealous when they use a Mac and see how smoothly it works?
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