For the longest time, I’ve had a problem where this stupid eth1394 module would be loaded and become eth0 instead of my network card (it would take eth1). Today, I was working on getting a DV camera hooked up through firewire and I finally found a solution. Insert this line into /etc/modprobe.conf (for 2.6 kernels):
install eth1394 /bin/true

Yay!

http://chaosengine.net/p5020d says that “for a 2.4 you add the following to /etc/modutils/local then run update-modules: alias eth1394 off”