== My problem with Ethernet naming on Red Hat Enterprise 5

Here's my problem: I have a bunch of identical 1U servers (SunFire
X2100 M2s) with four onboard Ethernet ports, driven by two different
chipsets (two nVidia ones, two Broadcom ones). I want to configure our
RHEL installs so that no matter which physical unit I stuff the system
disks into, the Ethernet ports come up with consistent names that match
the ports on the back of the server; _eth0_ should always be the port
labeled 'port 0' and so on.

(Since they have hotswap drive bays, we want to be able to easily swap
drives between units in case of hardware failure or the like. It also
simplifies general administration a bunch if the Ethernet naming matches
the hardware naming.)

In the good old days, this was simple; just set up _/etc/modprobe.conf_
to alias _eth0_ and _eth1_ to the _tg3_ driver and _eth1_ and
_eth2_ to the _forcedeth_ driver, and everything [[usually worked
NetworkInterfaceNaming]].

In the new world of _udev_, not so much; [[much like with Ubuntu
UbuntuEthernetNaming]], everything *really* wants to name things based
on known Ethernet addresses, and there seems to be no way to control
what order modules are loaded in.  The furthest I've gotten is a
configuration that does nothing with any 'new' Ethernet ports, so you
have to log in on the console and change all of the _HWADDR_ values in
the ifcfg files to have the correct Ethernet addresses.

(To do this, you have to turn off _kudzu_ with '_chkconfig --del
kudzu_'. If you leave it enabled, it will helpfully configure any 'new'
Ethernet ports to do DHCP on boot, and in the process it will replace
your working ifcfg files with new ones. Yes, it leaves the old files
around with _.bak_ extensions, but I am pretty sure that if you swap
hardware twice you will lose them entirely.)