[Gllug] How to stop hotplug being "clever"?

[John Winters]

A week or so ago I posted a plea for help with a box which suddenly
seemed to have lost its ethernet port.  Someone kindly suggested it
might be poor earthing, but I tried that and it didn't help.

After days of puzzling over it, I've finally found out what's wrong -
it's trying to use its firewire port as an ethernet port in preference
to the real ethernet port!  I only realised this when I booted with an
up-to-date Sarge installation CD and it said, "Which of your ethernet
ports would you like to use?"

The box in question had not been re-booted for several months, during
which time it's been steadily tracking the Sarge updates.  For some
reason the workings of hotplug seem to have changed, to the extent that
it now chooses "ethernet over firewire" in preference to plain ethernet
when left to its own devices at boot time.  As a result, it tries to use
the firewire port as eth0 and, surprise surprise, nothing works.  If I
add some configuration for eth1 and do an "ifup eth1" it springs into
life.  To my mind, that's a pretty severe bug (the change, if not the
choice) in Sarge - I wonder how they'd like me to raise a new RC bug
report?

So, can anyone tell me how to change the configuration and tell it to
use the real ethernet port as eth0?  I recall one used (pre-hotplug) to
do this with an alias in /etc/modules.conf, but I've added:

    alias eth0 via_rhine

there and it doesn't make any difference.  Can anyone tell me how to do
it please?

TIA,
John

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