order of IP addresses on an interface? (5.3)

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

I have a FreeBSD 5.3 system running and several jails running on it.   
I have a piece of software licensed to the base system IP since the  
software's IP detector, in past tests, would pick up the base and the  
jail IPs as valid.  This would allow me to run the software in any  
jail on that licensed server.  (The license is to the HW server --  
not a particular jail since all jails run on the same system using  
the same kernel etc).

Anyway, I rebooted the machine the other day and now the software  
won't run in the jails.  The reason is that its IP detection for the  
license (license is geared to the IP) now picks up the jail IP,  
another of the alias jail IPs for another jail, and "localhost" and  
it does not pick up the base system IP any more.

So I went to the base system outside of the jails and did an ifconfig  
-a .  It shows all the IPs (some 40) assigned to the interface and  
the other jail IP that the software's license piece found was listed  
first in this ifconfig so I am guessing that the software gets the  
list of IPs as given by ifconfig.

Is there any way to influence the order of the IPs listed by  
ifconfig?  It is not the order they were declared in the /etc/rc.conf  
which created them. The system base IP was listed first

ifconfig_bge0="inet  xxx.70.252.132  netmask 255.255.255.0"
ifconfig_bge0_alias0="inet xxx.70.252.50 netmask 255.255.255.255"
ifconfig_bge0_alias1="inet xxx.70.252.37 netmask 255.255.255.255"
ifconfig_bge0_alias2="inet xxx.70.252.9 netmask 255.255.255.255"  #
ifconfig_bge0_alias3="inet xxx.70.252.34 netmask 255.255.255.255"
ifconfig_bge0_alias4="inet xxx.70.252.31 netmask 255.255.255.255"
ifconfig_bge0_alias5="inet xxx.70.252.231 netmask 255.255.255.255"
.
.
.


The base system IP is .132 but ifconfig shows .34 first and this is  
the IP that is found by the sw license code.

Any ideas welcome
Thanks
Chad

---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
Your Web App and Email hosting provider
chad at shire.net