Network devices swapped. All contact lost.

[DavePrince]

I have a machine with an AsusK8V-X motherboard which has an onboard Marvell gigabit network device. I've never managed to get this to work, but that's never bothered me before as (A) I had a spare old intel 10/100 PCI NIC which just worked out of the box (well, bubble wrap), and (B) my little ADSL modem/switch/router is only 100Mb anyway. So I configured the NIC on eth0 using the e100 module and have had the machine running quite happily for about a year just ignoring the onboard networking.

Last weekend I synced portage and updated the world, added a new TV card, upgraded the kernel (only _r3 to _r4 I think) and reconfigured it to add in DVB support, replaced the GeForce FX 5200 graphics card with a 6600LE, and then reverted the GC change 'cause I couldn't get TV-out working, ... basically something of an upheaval.

Somewhere along the line the network devices have swapped over. The old card is now eth1 and the on board device is eth0, and neither of them work

I've tried changing conf.d/net to use eth1 not eth0, and switching the rc scripts to eth1 as well; I've tried reconfiguring the kernel to get rid of all traces of gigabit networking and the Marvell drivers; I've even had another half-hearted attempt at getting the gigabit device working properly (my best guess at the moment is that it's not auto-negotiating down to 100Mb); but nothing works. I can't get a single ping to/from anywhere.

Unfortunately I'm not particularly savvy at networking. I'd managed to set my little network (2 machines + switch/router) up with static IPs and names but that's about it. I'm not even sure what info would be useful to post. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

[erik258]

uh, why don't you just switch the network cables to match? or put the removable network card back in the slot it was originally in?
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[DavePrince]

[gami]

Your problem with the network cards appearing in a different order could be the same problems that was mentioned in last weeks Gentoo Linux Newsletter (udev coldplugging and /etc/init.d/modules). Coldplugging as done by recent udev may load kernel modules in a different order than the old coldplug did. The newsletter points to the relevant section in the udev rules documentation.

[DavePrince]