determine what card is eth1, or 2, or whatever

[bobmccarthy]

I think this is a relatively simple question I'm looking in the wrong place for an answer to. I just spent the last few days trying to figure out why my ipw2200 wireless card all the sudden failed when I upgraded to 2.6.16, when finally I found a post saying that 2.6.16 in debian recognized my firewire as eth1 (formerly my wireless card) and I've been fighting with every driver under the sun for nothing. All I had to do was ifup eth2 and it worked great.

My question: how could I have known this prior? I have been cat'ting /proc files all over, looked at dmesg, searched logs, and I still can't seem to find where it would tell me what card eth0, eth1, and eth2 would be assigned to.

I know this is simple and I'm just missing it somewhere, but in all my time screwing around with linux, I've never had the need to know this.

Any help would be appreciated.

[dkeav]

ifconfig -a, and the word "Wireless" in the media section would have tipped me off

media: IEEE 802.11 Wireless Ethernet autoselect mode 11g <hostap>

[bobmccarthy]

I'm talking about prior to having them configured... ie, ifconfig = nothing. I'm trying to determine where, if possible, it is to find how the module for the given ethernet device is aliased to eth0.

[je_fro]

dmesg | grep eth

[bobmccarthy]

That was the first thing I tried... it shows, it my case, eth0 and 1, the 10/100 card and the firewire respectively, but makes absolutely no mention of eth2. Note output below:

eth0: Broadcom 4400 10/100BaseT Ethernet 00:12:3f:e1:9e:a5
eth1394: eth1: IEEE-1394 IPv4 over 1394 Ethernet (fw-host0)
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
b44: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
b44: eth0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX.
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
eth0: no IPv6 routers present
device eth0 entered promiscuous mode
b44: eth0: Link is down.
device eth0 left promiscuous mode
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready
b44: eth0: Link is up at 100 Mbps, full duplex.
b44: eth0: Flow control is on for TX and on for RX.
ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready
eth0: no IPv6 routers present



So, once again, I wonder if there is a direct way to tell what a module is aliased to. In my case, I would have wanted to find some place where I could go to look at the ipw2200 module (the driver for my wireless card) and seen exactly what device it was aliased as.

[happybunny]

lshw might help

Redhat also uses /etc/sysconfig/hwconf file

lspci may also help..."normally" linux will address them as it finds the cards on the bus....

[ph34r]

order of device is by what order modules are loaded, if there are more than one card that use the same module, it is in order of discovery on the bus

[je_fro]

if it doesn't appear in dmesg, then the module isn't getting loaded...or else you're using the wrong module.

[bobmccarthy]

je_fro - which brings up an interesting question... how do I tell I have the right module, then? The ipw2200 module is loaded and used in lsmod, along with ieee80211 for the wireless card. It is an intel 2200 wireless card. I see the module being loaded in dmesg, see it tying correctly to the card, but nowhere in dmesg does it show that it was eth2. When I finally realized that eth1 was pointing to the firewire, I did an ifup eth2 and it worked perfectly.

happybunny - I didn't get a chance to try the lshw as my debian install didn't have it, so I'll dig into that. lspci does show my pci devices, it just doesn't correlate that to the alias, unfortunately.

Thanks, all, for responses, but I'm guessing the simple answer must be that there is no way to tell for sure what device has taken what alias.

[je_fro]

Yeah, you set that up using whatever tools your distro has...it's the alias lines in /etc/modules.conf