Eric Hines wrote:
I think I have an understanding of what's going on (and it was me that was missing something), and I now have a stable set up. What Mike is describing is consistent with the ifstatus man page saying that ethx is no longer bound to a NIC, since the advent of removable NICs (e.g., via USB). James is saying the same thing when he says don't worry about which eth is which, just get the NICs and IP addresses right. I followed James' suggestion and edited the ifcfg-eth-id-<MAC Address> files, and I've had a stable (under my clearer understanding of the meaning of "stable") set up since. There was one of two things going on with the latter: either YaST was messing up when I used it to edit the files, and I straightened that out when I edited the files directly, or I was collecting bad data and there were no wandering NIC/IP address problems all along. Unfortunately, I have to lean toward the latter.
At any rate, thanks for taking the time to set me in the right direction.
Did you also notice that while ifconfig supports only eth0 etc., ifstatus can work with either form? Yast also uses the ethid-<MAC address> version, instead of ethx. BTW, you don't have to copy your messages to everyone. We all read the same list and get all the same messages.