Hi,

I have a Toshiba laptop with an ipw2200 wireless device.  It currently
runs Fedora Core 6 but I've tried a few other distros on it (mostly booting
from a small set of /boot partitions I keep at the back of the disk, and
mounting most of the rest of their stuff from an attached USB disk, but
I wouldn't think that'd cause the problem).

Quite frequently, I'd say about 25% of the time, when it boots it comes up
with a message during network initialisation saying "ipw2200 device eth1
not found, skipping initialisation" or whatever the distro's words to that
effect are.  When I run "ipconfig -a" or look in /dev I found that the ipw2200
device that is normally /dev/eth1 has in fact set itself up as /dev/__tmp22993
or something equally stupid.  Rebooting usually makes the problem go away,
although sometimes it gets on a roll and I have to reboot anything up to 10
times before I get eth1 back.  I haven't found any way of fixing this other
than rebooting.

I've looked through all of the various scripts in /etc/init.d and I can't
see what's causing this.  Obviously it's creating a temp file name somewhere
and expecting that to be translated into eth1, but it doesn't happen, and
I can't figure out where.  I've even pulled apart the initrd and can't see
anything in there causing it either.

Because this happens on a number of recent distros, perhaps it's a devfs
or udev or similar problem?  Can someone who knows the ins and outs of
udev/devfs/hal/etc or other hardware detection shed some light on it?  Is
there some way of just nailing the device mapping up so that the ipw2200
device always appears as eth1 (and yes, it's listed as that in 
/etc/modprobe.conf,
which just goes to show that perhaps everything should be done in simple
config files and all of this autodetection rubbish should be taken out and
shot).

--
Del
Babel Com Australia
http://www.babel.com.au/
ph: 02 9368 0728
fax: 02 9368 0758
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