On: Eth0 no more?

[rdtsc]

Well it depends. There is a kernel parameter that forces a consistent walk order:

   pci=bfsort

It forces breadth-first device sorting.

But otherwise I understand that devices are detected in parallel and whichever ones return first are designated eth0, eth1 etc.

We had this problem on some machine that have 4+ eth0 devices. We use RHEL|CentOS 5.x (see in the post above how we solved the problem).

[moe → rdtsc]

This!

I once had a server (in the pre-udev era) that would occasionally shuffle its network devices after reboots. I don't remember how I fixed it but I do remember the short phase of amusement, followed by a longer phase of frustration.