[Voyage-linux] Alix/Voyage ethernet behavior

[Mike Galusha]

I'm pretty new when it comes to using Voyage with an Alix board but I 
thought I'd share something that I experienced that perhaps someone can 
explain to me as I'm not a Linux guru and know enough to be dangerous. :)

A friend recently lent me his Alix box running Voyage MPD to try out and 
asked that I create a new image on my own CF card so as not to alter his 
network settings. This was not a problem and it worked as expected 
including mounting an SMB share on a Windows box where my music files 
currently live. Everything worked great and I promptly ordered up an 
Alix board and case.

My surprise came when I put my existing CF card in the new board and 
powered it up. Logging into the router I didn't see it getting a dhcp 
address. Thinking perhaps I'd gotten a bad board I dug through my old 
stuff and came up with a couple of 9 pin serial cables and spliced them 
together this morning to make a null modem cable so I could see if it 
was alive or dead. The good news is that it was booting up just fine but 
I noticed in the console messages that it was renaming eth0 to eth3 and 
eth1 to eth2 and when it tried to start eth0 and get a dhcp address, it 
received a device not found error since eth0 no longer existed. I was 
able to edit /etc/network/interfaces and change eth0 to eth3 and it 
happily picked up an address which I then reserved in my dhcp server. 
Everything works fine but I'm curious as why this happened.

My guess is that when I used the CF image on the other Alix board it 
recorded the MAC addresses of the ports and it's reassigning these so 
there is no conflict. This is a total guess as I don't know enough about 
Linux to know but it was the only thing I could think of that made sense.

Any thoughts would be welcome so I can further my understanding.

Thanks,

Mike G.


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