Okay I installed a 8139 PCI card into my Pegasos II just because when I used MorphOS as my main OS on it. I am using MOLK to boot OS X and still cant get networking up and running. I think MOLK is hard coded to only use eth0. If I go into the scripts and use any other port it will not get an IP from my router at all. I can tell because I go in the setting and look at the status for local network and its not there under MOLK. In ubuntu it doesnt matter what port I use, they all work.

Anyway to get to my point. The Via_rhine now that I have the PCI card pulled out is assigned as eth2 and the Gigabit port is eth0. If I plug into eth0 it gets the IP but still wont work in OSX if I use it. So I try to change everything to point to eth2 and no IP given!

Can I change the Via port to eth0? What nakes the system decide what port is assigned as eth0, eth2 ect? It must be somehing in the router since in Ubuntu its also the same eth2 for via ect.

I would say that PCI-cards are the devices to first get a port
number in the boot. In my terabyte Pegasos 2 fileserver with
2 SIL060 cards the disks on those cards got hda/b hdc/d. Linux
didn't care that I configured up without the PCI-cards and hda
as onboard primary disk.. After inserting the cards the system
disk was named hde and of course mounting root failed.

On PC long time ago i've done this with lines like this in /etc/modules.conf:

alias eth0 <card-module-name>

I guess this still works in /etc/modprobe.d/

This still works.

Pretty much you need to do this on Linux since each time you change module load order (which could be every kernel build for all you'd know, depending on the makefile or a device probe or parallelisation of the boot process), the ethernet devices are picked up in that order. eth0 is the first, eth1 is the second. You have no way of fixing it, unlike something like BSD, where you can guarantee your via will be on re0, rtl will be on rl0, marvell would be.. I dunno. mv0? Either way you can force it with kernel build flags in your config file or let the device order be determined by the HARDWARE order, and not "how my kernel was built".

Personally I alias them to BSD-like names so I don't get confused when I move between BSD and Linux.

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Matt Sealey