On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:26:09 +1100 Nick Urbanik wrote:
I would really like to understand NetworkManager, but it makes things more complicated for me on this machine.
For a change this particular problem has nothing to do with NetworkManager :-). Look in /etc/udev/rules.d/ for a file named something like 70-persistent-net.rules
It has a udev rule fixing the ethernet interface name based on the MAC. If you replace a NIC, the name always gets changed until you edit this file and remove the old interface and change the named of the new interface (and reboot).