[blog...]

I'm working from time to time with my three year old Samsung Q35 laptop with Debian stable installed all the time. So at the moment, it's running Lenny.

Usually, I'm too excited about new kernel features and bugfixes and don't wait for the next debian release but compile the kernel myself. That's what I'm used to do for plenty of years now.

My system is running now with current 2.6.31.5 kernel and uses the iwl3945 driver for wifi. But one point was always annoying to me: The wifi device was called "wlan0_rename" and sometimes it started with "eth2"! And that's the p oint: when it started with eth2, I had to reconfigure /etc/network/interfaces (stupid) or reboot and hope for wlan0_rename (stupid as well).

Today, I started to google the solution which is quite simple thanks to two threads/bugreports:

In the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules, I changed the following lines:

# PCI device 0x8086:0x4222 (ipw3945)
#SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:18:de:87:f3:b9", NAME="eth2"
SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:18:de:87:f3:b9", ATTR{type}=="1", \
KERNEL=="wlan*", NAME="wlan0"

And wow! It starts _always_ with wlan0.

Thanks to the original poster and to this bugreport.