[CentOS] 6.x - find interface with link up

[Philip Manuel]

On 12/17/2011 05:33 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:23 AM, Marko Vojinovic<vvmarko at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Thursday 15 December 2011 16:04:35 Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 3:39 PM,<m.roth at 5-cent.us>  wrote:
>>>>>>> In earlier versions 'mii-tool' would iterate over interfaces and
>>>>>>> show
>>>>>>> which have link up.   In 6.x it wants an interface as a parameter.
>>>>>>> What is the appropriate way to find which of some number of of
>>>>>>> interfaces are connected?   Better yet, what is the least typing
>>>>>>> to
>>>>>>> get the mac addresses of those interfaces?
>>>> Dumb question: in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, do the ifcfg-* have
>>>> HWADDRs?
>>> They do, but the case I want to cover is where an existing server is
>>> cloned, or the disk has been moved from a failed chassis to a spare.
>>> And in this case the existing files will be wrong, and the nics will
>>> be named more or less randomly.   Assume the hands-on operators don't
>>> know much about linux and you can't actively help until they get at
>>> least one of the right IP's on the right NIC.
>>>
>>> With 5.x I'd use mii-tool to find the connected interface (connecting
>>> one wire at a time if necessary), then ifconfig on that interface to
>>> get the hwaddr, then edit that into the ifcfg-* file for the names I
>>> want the active NICs to have, and reboot.   That's awkward enough to
>>> ask someone to do who already prefers windows, and it looks like it
>>> just got harder by having to explicitly run mii-tool for each possible
>>> interface (and we always have 4 to 6 per box).   There has to be a
>>> better way.   I thought 6.1 was going to have a new NIC name
>>> convention but I haven't had time to look into it and have to make
>>> something work now.
>> Your situation is the "textbook usecase" example for biosdevname
>> (http://linux.dell.com/biosdevname). It is a way to consistently name the
>> network devices according to their physical location in a computer. For
>> example, a typical NIC would not have a name "eth1", but "p2p3" (which means
>> "port 3 of the NIC in PCI slot 2") or "em2" (which is "2nd ethernet port on
>> the motherboard"). So once the hands-on operator plugs a cable into a
>> particular port, you immediately know the corresponding interface name that
>> the system will use for that connection. And in addition, this is MAC-address
>> independent, so moving the hard drive from one box to the other requires
>> basically no reconfiguration (as long as the operator plugs the same cables
>> into the same sockets).
>>
>> The biosdevname was first introduced in Fedora 15
>> (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDeviceNaming), ie.
>> only after RHEL 6 was already rolled out. Apparently, it has to cooperate
>> intimately with the kernel, udev, initscripts, dracut, anaconda, kickstart,
>> etc., --- so it is not just a userland app which one could yum install in a
>> trivial way.
>>
>> Therefore, somehow I doubt that CentOS 6 will ever see biosdevname implemented
>> (maybe in the CentOSplus kernel and a "use at your own risk" label?), since it
>> involves too many system changes and breaks backward compatibility. But RHEL 7
>> is almost certainly going to have it, since this is actually the proper (and
>> permanent) solution to the problem you have.
> I thought I saw it mentioned in release notes for RHEL 6.1 but it said
> something about support being limited to certain Dell models.  I'm not
> sure it is going to be perfect anyway, since most of the machines in
> question have Broadcom NICs on the motherboards and the ones we
> actually use are on Intel cards that may not exactly match types or
> slot positions.   But I'd settle for something that had something to
> do with the slot position...
>
http://www.pkje.net/meander/?p=115 - this may help on the device 
ordering for 6.x if you know the mac addresses then you can fix the 
names of the interfaces