jhofmann
October 14th, 2006, 10:03 AM
My System76 laptop was pre-loaded with Dapper. It never seemed to have an "eth0", started life with eth1 and eth2 for the wired port and the wireless port. The kernel randomly re-assigned eth1 and eth2, so I had to reconfigure networking using network manager almost every time I booted. I could always make it work, but only after reconfiguring.
Well guess what: There is a file named /etc/iftab that contained mappings from eth* devices to actual hardware by means of mac addresses. This is all well documented, once I knew where to look. The mappings did not, however, go with my machine. I did not have that hardware in my machine. I bet that hardware was in some poor, long-suffering developer's machine and something in the installation software failed to change that file to use the mac addresses in my machine.
I'm not completely satisfied with my changes and haven't tested it yet in a wireless situation, but it sure seems wrong to have mac addresses in /etc/iftab that aren't in the computer, so I'm following that up enthusiastically.
Comments? Something else I should be doing? This ever happen to anyone else?
Jim
Well guess what: There is a file named /etc/iftab that contained mappings from eth* devices to actual hardware by means of mac addresses. This is all well documented, once I knew where to look. The mappings did not, however, go with my machine. I did not have that hardware in my machine. I bet that hardware was in some poor, long-suffering developer's machine and something in the installation software failed to change that file to use the mac addresses in my machine.
I'm not completely satisfied with my changes and haven't tested it yet in a wireless situation, but it sure seems wrong to have mac addresses in /etc/iftab that aren't in the computer, so I'm following that up enthusiastically.
Comments? Something else I should be doing? This ever happen to anyone else?
Jim