Whence commeth eth0?

[Tim]

On Tue, 2009-08-25 at 09:16 -0700, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
> My ASUS MB returned from repair with ethernet device changed from eth0
> to eth1 and a new MAC address. Is this information encoded on the chip
> (meaning that they replaced the chip) or ... ?

The MAC is set in the networking hardware.  It's supposed to be unique.
Change the hardware, and the MAC changes.

Your computer will permanently associate particular ethernet device
names (eth0, etc.) with particular MACs, if configured to do so (which
seems to be the default).  Otherwise eth0 is just the first ethernet
device it finds.

Many network devices allow you to change the MAC, this allows you to
keep on using a network that expects no changes.  So you can get away
with changing routers, etc., and only have to reprogram the changed
hardware, rather than everything else.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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