I have two servers with identical hardware ... TYAN i3210w system boards with dual intel gigabit interfaces, and a PCI intel gigabit nic. I'm running Centos 5.4, x86_64, 2.6.18-164.6.1.el5
Every other time I reboot, the nics initialize in a different order.
anaconda had setup /etc/modprobe.conf with alias lines for the cards:
alias eth0 e1000 alias eth1 e1000e alias eth2 e1000e
However, introducing the bonding driver into the mix seems to have thrown a wrench in the works.
alias bond0 bonding options bond0 miimon=80 mode=5 #or something like that, can't get to the machine right now - no console and the network is down
So, I read about the ifcfg options and try assigning each config script an HWADDR line.
after rebooting, /var/log/messages announces that hardware address for eth1 does not match, skipping ... same for eth2
Reading the archives seems to indicate modprobe.conf doesn't do much and is made obsolete by udev, and that hwaddr is discouraged because it's a band-aid. The archives seem to suggest fiddling with udev to be the answer. So I modify /etc/udev/rules.d/60-net (or something) and add a few rules found in an ancient example (those aren't my mac addresses): KERNEL=="eth?", SYSFS{address}=="00:37:e9:17:64:af", NAME="eth0" # MAC of first NIC in lowercase KERNEL=="eth?", SYSFS{address}=="00:21:e9:17:64:b5", NAME="eth1" # MAC of second NIC in lowercase
Now, all three network cards get assigned as eth0! eth1 and eth2 are no longer found. The pci-express nics (onboard) get detected first, and the pci nic is last, so it ends up "owning" the eth0 alias.
I don't really care which alias gets assigned to which nic, but I want that assignment to be constant.
All suggestions are appreciated!
Gordon