Two NICs - swapped initialization

[Kenneth]

Hoping someone knows this one, to save me what would probably turn into a
couple of days of research to satisfy my curiosity :)

I have been running Gentoo for a while, and this machine is my router and
firewall. It has two ethernet controllers in it.  When I first installed, it
called the controller I wanted to be eth0, eth1 and vice versa (I know it
doesn't really matter, but it's a personal idiosyncracy).  I placed the names
for the modules in the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 file, with the one
I wanted to be eth0 first, and that got them in my preferred order so I
assumed that the first loaded module would be eth0.

Well after an update the other day, the two swapped places and I wasn't able
to get them back, so finally just left them.  It wasn't all bad, I discovered
a bug in my firewall setup script when it failed, but I'm curious what
decides which controller is which, and how it could change on it's own.



 
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