Red Hat

I have an RHEL 5 server with 2 Broadcom on-board NICs and 2 quad-port Intel NICs. After I installed the OS, the Intel NICs became eth0-7, and the onboards are eth8 and eth9. I really need the onboard NICs to be eth0 and eth1 (I have plans to later remove the quad-ports and replace them with 10gE cards but that's another story). What's the right way to renumber the existing eth devices? I have the following entries in modprobe.conf:

Code:

alias eth0 e1000e
alias eth1 e1000e
alias eth2 e1000e
alias eth3 e1000e
alias eth4 e1000e
alias eth5 e1000e
alias eth6 e1000e
alias eth7 e1000e
alias eth8 bnx2
alias eth9 bnx2

Should I just change the names in there and also modify the ifcfg-* files? Or is there more to this? How do I make sure that after I reboot, the names will not change back?

Usually, it should be enough to just change the names of the ifcfg-* files, and restart the network service. Additionally, to ensure that the name always binds to the right port, add the line

Code:

HWADDR=<MAC address>

to the appropriate file.