On 5/3/2011 9:42 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
If you've got one nic, it'a a pretty sure bet that any detection order is going to call it eth0. Add a few more and I think you'll change your opinion, especially with that headless situation where all you can do is move wires until ssh works. That's extra fun when you on the phone and paying by the hour for remote support.
*shrug* I don't have a lot of systems with more than one NIC, but I can always do ethtool eth<whatever> till I see a link detected - that's a matter of a minute or two, unless you've got a *lot* of ports.
We typically have at least 2 active, some with 4 or 5, and the machines mostly come with broadcomm NICs on the motherboard which we ignore and add Intel server cards. So there are always 4 to 8 possibilities and 2 to 5 connected wires with link up and the intel cards have an approximately random chance of starting at eth0 or eth2. We have machines at several locations and like to ship preconfigured disks to meet them, but it doesn't work very well. If we only used one OS I suppose it would be worth building some specialized infrastructure to support it's quirks, but it would be nicer if it just did something predictable. At least most of them go to our larger data centers where we have our own operators present to configure the addresses. These machines generally aren't rebooted for many months at a time and are in load balanced groups so it doesn't matter how long it takes.