Hm, this may not be the real answer, but just some thoughts I had.
11.1 is beyond support since the beginning of 2011, thus most people will not be able to check or try out thigs for you on their systems.
I have 11.2 and it uses eth0 as a device name. I tested 11.4 and I can not remember that it did not use eth0 (and I do allways go into YaST to fine tune the configuration). Thus I have no notice of this being an “old device name”. This brings me to the question, are you very sure that what you experience has something to do with a new way of device naming?
Editing 70-persistent-net.rules and renaming the ifcfg files should work.
If you want to avoid the reboot you can just remove the kernel modules for the NICs and then reload them.
>
> Hm, this may not be the real answer, but just some thoughts I had.
>
> 1) 11.1 is beyond support since the beginning of 2011, thus most people
> will not be able to check or try out thigs for you on their systems.
>
> 2) I have 11.2 and it uses eth0 as a device name. I tested 11.4 and I
> can not remember that it did not use eth0 (and I do allways go into YaST
> to fine tune the configuration). Thus I have no notice of this being an
> “old device name”. This brings me to the question, are you very sure
> that what you experience has something to do with a new way of device
> naming?
>
i’ve seen device names like that in debian. you didn’t by chance import
settings from that, or another, system into openSUSE?