How to rename wireless interface on bootup using ifrename

Message

krosswindz · Post by **krosswindz** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:12 pm

I have the intel pro wireless 2200 BG card in my laptop. Before version 1.0.0 I had the option of setting the interface name as wlan%d using the ifname module parameter. From 1.0.0 ipw2200 uses regular kernel way to change interface name using ifrename. I have the iftab setup but I want to be able to choose the correct interface name when the module is loaded. The problem being that I use lvm and my /usr is not mounted until after all my modules are loaded because of which hotplug isnt able to rename my device correctly. Any idea as to what I could do to solve this problem. Any help on this is appreciated

thesnowman · Post by **thesnowman** » Tue Feb 15, 2005 11:30 pm

I used to use /etc/modules.d/aliases:

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echo "alias eth1 ipw2200" >> /etc/modules.d/aliases && /sbin/modules-update

to ensure that my interface was always eth1. I don't know if this will work for wlan0, but you could try it.

krosswindz · Post by **krosswindz** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 5:57 am

I tried the alias with wlan0, it never worked. If I rmmod ipw2200 and then modprobe it again it comes as wlan0 because of hotplug. It doesnt do that on the first autoload. I just want the first autoload to work. Thanks for the help

thesnowman · Post by **thesnowman** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 7:03 am

This has changed in version net-wireless/ipw2200-1.0.1 not 1.0.0. I had 1.0.0 installed until this morning. I have now installed 1.0.1 and the behaviour has changed. My interface is now called eth0 and as you rightly say, the alias does not change it to eth1. I'm going to downgrade...

thesnowman · Post by **thesnowman** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 7:39 am

Have a look at this thread on the ipw2100 mailing list, in particular the first and second replies:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/mess ... d=10808215

Brix suggests that this is documented in the CHANGES file, however I could not see it:

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less /usr/share/doc/ipw2200-1.0.1/CHANGES.gz

Hopefully Brix will see this thread and let us know where it is mentioned...

The third reply suggests a fix using UDEV. I am testing now and will let you know if it works for me.

P.S. shouldn't this thread be in Networking & Security...

thesnowman · Post by **thesnowman** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 8:09 am

Got it to work with the following udev rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/10-udev.rules:

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KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS{address}="00:0e:35:6f:33:66", NAME="wlan0"

Obviously change the mac address to match your adapter.

I used

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# udevinfo -a -p /sys/class/net/eth0/

as specified in the writing udev rules document to determine the mac address. ifconfig printed it in CAPS which obviously wouldn't match.

krosswindz · Post by **krosswindz** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 4:02 am

Thanks for the tip, it worked. Another quick question is it possible to free up eth1 so that some other device can use it instead of it being named eth2, probably I am asking for too much

ribx · Post by **ribx** » Sat Feb 26, 2005 3:42 pm

i am not running udev. here how i did it:

echo '<new_name> mac xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx' >> /etc/iftab

reload the module. thats all. it seems that the driver reads it out. i dont understand it realy but it works

for more info:
man ifrename
man iftab

first i though i have to run ifrename, but when i did it it told me that the device was busy. so i tried to reload it with modprobe et voila:

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wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"LUTZHOME"  Nickname:"LUTZHOME"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.457 GHz  Access Point: 00:04:E2:B6:C2:BA
          Bit Rate=54 Mb/s   Tx-Power=255 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:AF91-2211-84AB-CDEF-0987-6543-21   Security mode:open
          Power Management:off
          Link Quality=96/100  Signal level=-31 dBm  Noise level=-85 dBm
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

it works (without running ifrename :/ )

-ribx

krosswindz · Post by **krosswindz** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 4:25 pm

The reason that works is that you are using hotplug. When you load the module hotplug looks for /etc/iftab and see that you have /etc/iftab so uses ifrename to rename the module when you reinsert it. It doesnt seem to be able to pick it up when it boots which kind of baffles me. I dont want to go through the process of reinserting the module every boot. udev rule works for me.

KhanReaper · Post by **KhanReaper** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 5:55 pm

What system package provides ifrename and iftab?

ribx · Post by **ribx** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 7:23 pm

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notebook ~ # qpkg -f `which ifrename`
net-wireless/wireless-tools *

ribx · Post by **ribx** » Wed Jun 22, 2005 8:39 pm

i have another problem now:

i switched to the udev thing, because my wlan card has the mac address 00:00:00:00:00:00 if it is switched off by the hardware key. maybe you think that shouldnt be a problem, something like

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wlan0 mac 00:0E:35:75:7C:07
wlan0 mac 00:00:00:00:00:00

would do the job, but there is one problem: i'm using the cisco vpn client. it loads a pseudo driver, which also has the mac address 00:00:...:00.

ok so far i was yesterday. then i desided to make this more comforable for me and use udev. but udev needs about 5 seconds to change the name of the wireless card from eth0 to wlan0. i dont want to add a 5 seconds sleep to my init.d script which loads ipw2200. thats too ugly. here some informations:

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notebook ~ # grep eth /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules 
KERNEL="eth*",SYSFS{address}="00:0f:1f:25:89:79", NAME="eth0"
KERNEL="eth*", NAME="wlan0"

*  sys-fs/udev
      Latest version available: 056
      Latest version installed: 056
      Size of downloaded files: 468 kB
      Homepage:    http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev.html
      Description: Linux dynamic and persistent device naming support (aka userspace devfs)
      License:     GPL-2

rabinath · Post by **rabinath** » Tue Nov 28, 2006 11:05 am

Just for those using

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KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS{address}="00:0e:35:6f:33:66", NAME="wlan0"

Since my latest udev update to sys-fs/udev-103 the code above did not work any longer. I had to change it a little (note the double ==) to:

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KERNEL=="eth*", SYSFS{address}=="00:0e:35:6f:33:66", NAME="wlan0"

bookstack · Post by **bookstack** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 1:30 pm

Let me push it further:

Yes, we can set the udev rule by mac address, it also works.

How could we *automatically* rename the eth%d interface to wlan0%d, if the device is driven by ndiswrapper or ipw2200?

PaulBredbury · Post by **PaulBredbury** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 3:22 pm

bookstack wrote:How could we *automatically* rename the eth%d interface to wlan0%d

I assume you mean %n - there is no %d in man udev. This is a bad question. The point of customizing udev is to unambiguously assign a meaningful name to devices. A name which contains a random number defeats the point of having meaning.

There are lots of threads of moaning about udev randomly rearranging e.g. eth0 and eth1, and thus messing up the networking

This is why the MAC address is used - it unambiguously identifies the device to rename. However, if you're sure that only 1 device in the PC is linked to ndiswrapper, then perhaps this will work:

/etc/udev/rules.d/10-local.rules

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SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="ndiswrapper", NAME="wlan"