eth0/eth1 identity crisis on PB G4

[John M. Wright]

When the CDs for YDL 3.0 became available, I installed it
on a brand new gigaherz G4 PowerBook. There were some minor
glitches in the installation (I wound up having to use the
text-based installer) but on the whole I was very favorably
impressed by how many things "just worked", or worked with
minimal tweaking. (AirPort networking, printing, MOL, power
management, sleeping.....).  Recently I took this laptop
along on vacation, where for the first time I employed the
built-in ethernet port and the internal modem for internet
access (yes, even the internal modem worked after following
the ibook internal modem howto posted on the YellowDog support
site).  Before and during the trip, eth0 was always the built-in
ethernet port, and eth1 was the AirPort card.  Since I have
returned, the AirPort has almost always showed up as eth0, with
the internal ethernet as eth1, although occasionally it has
reverted to the original designation.

Has anyone else observed this sort of behavior and/or have
any ideas about how to control it?  Or do I need to try to
tweak the network startup scripts to try to determine which of
eth0/eth1 represents the AirPort card and proceed accordingly?

I have observed a similar eth0/eth1 transposition before, on
an old beige G3 with two NICs, but that was associated with
the change from kernel 2.2 to 2.4, and it was stable as long
as I stuck with one kernel or the other.

John Wright