Mystery of device names

[Timothy Murphy]

When I attached my laptop with ethernet to an ADSL modem
on my travels it chose to use dev10788 as device;
I've no idea where it got this name from.

I tried to persuade it to use eth0, eth1 or eth2
without success.
So it seemed simplest to fit in with its desire,
and I added an entry /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-dev10788 ,
and added "alias dev10788 e100" to /etc/modprobe.conf .
This has worked perfectly for several days.

I've noticed before that computers often seem to insist
on using a particular device,
without any particular reason as far as I can see.
Eg a WiFi card might work as eth1 but not as eth0,
no matter how hard one tries to persuade it.

Can some guru explain this to me, please?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Tridev10788nity College, Dublin 2, Ireland