how to fix the naming order of NIC

[leilei175 at gmail.com]

Hi,
I have a DELL 1950 with 2 on-board NIC,bnx2,and 2 PCI slots,on which 2
Intel NIC e1000 are used.After installing EnterpriseLinux5 the order
of these NIC would change boot by boot.
Sometime bnx2 may become the last 2 interface and other time may be in the
middle. (e.g. eth0:e1000, eth[12]:bnx2, eth[3-]:e1000).

How can I fix the order?I will expect the order of network interface
as on-board NIC, NIC on first slot then on second slot when the
machine is racked up and wire
the netwok cable.

I know adding one line in the file
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethN with
HWADDR="xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx"can fix the order,however it's difficult to
know the HWADDR untile the OS actually get installed.Moreover,if we
replace the card on the slot this would raise new problems.

another way I found on net is to use udev utils,which also requires
writing rules after installation,is there another way to fix the
ordering by the slot number without additional settings?

thanks