I'm trying to set a name for an interface, "ethLan" instead of eth0. Doing so also ensures that the if's name will remain consistent at every reboot and kernel.

I did find some articles in the subject, but they are all a couple of years old:  

<http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/463>  

<http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/downloads/files/nameif.txt>

I did as they said and added the **ethLan mac** to **/etc/mactabs/**.
At this point I have two problems:  

1) The `if [...] && /sbin/nameif` script I put at **/etc/network/if-pre-up.d/** does not run. I solved this by adding this to the */etc/init.d/networking*, but why doesn't *if-pre-up.d* work?  

2) The interface won't load unless I manually do **ifconfig ethLan up**, in spite of adding it to */etc/network/interfaces*. What am I doing wrong?