To give a bit of background about my Linux usage; I began with Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat back in 2001. By 2004 I decided that if I were ever to become proficient using Linux I needed to use it 24/7. At this point I had been trying Gentoo, so I loaded it on all of my boxes and have bounced around with various spin offs of Gentoo (Vidalinux and Funtoo). These days I have moved back to vanilla Gentoo and generally have a small installation of Ubuntu one each box for installing Gentoo.

I suppose if this blog has a purpose, it is primarily to list problems I've run across and fixed. The hope is that writing these solutions down will help my brain cell remember the solutions the next time around.

Now on to the fun stuff, which was udev automagically renaming ethernet devices. The standard tell comes about during system initialization, and rc screams about not being able to start eth0.

$ ifconfig -a

The above command should show the device labeled as something not eth0 (if you don't see anything promising there at all it could be the kernel does not have the driver you need). Now that we know some sort of network device exists there is hope of fixing it. In this case we need to tell udev to stop being so clever and give us back our preciously boring eth0. The solution I decided upon (there were several, I'll try to find links to the others) was adding a rule to /etc/udev/rules.d.

# ln -s /dev/null /etc/udev/rules.d/80-net-name-slot.rules
# /etc/init.d/udev restart
# /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start