> Uhm, his scenario (having two similar cards, one with parameters X at work,
> one with parameters Y at home) seems useful to me.

With the changes I'm proposing, plus either abuse of the ifmedia
carrier detect stuff or some relatively straightforward "device event"
support (which is outside the scope of this proposal) the hypothetical
user-space daemon can do the following:

 a) when an interface goes away, ifconfig xx0 down; ifconfig xx0 delete

 b) when an interface comes back, the script peeks at the MAC address,
and depending on the value, ifconfig it to values appropriate to the
MAC address.

(a) and (b) can be implemented in a shell script kicked off by an
apm-like or dhclient-like daemon.

I think this gives Jonathan exactly what he wants, except that the
interface name remains the same for both cards.

					- Bill