On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 6:08 AM, Steve Clark sclark@netwolves.com wrote:

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Warren Young warren@etr-usa.com wrote: Now I have to remember which *PCI slot* my Ethernet card is in when I run "ifconfig" unless I want to dig through the full listing. Yes, but that's something you _can_ know.

So... which PCI/PCI-e slots are associated with the dual gigabit NICs integrated in/on every ASUS board I've bought over the last 8 years?

I wouldn't know on the first one, but the important thing is that if you have 50 identical servers they would all be the same for the same physical location. The way 6.x works, the motherboard set and the pair on the card will randomly flip in the initial detection. With 5.x having the MAC address in the ifcfg-ethx file was enough. With 6.x you also need a udev rule to nail the name down. These get tied to MAC addresses in the initial install, but that makes it painful to clone systems or restore backups into a different box.

Hmm... we have over a 1000 units in the field and CentOS always enumerates the 6 ethx interfaces the same - as they are labeled by the manufacturer of the hardware. This has continued to be consistent even when the manufacturer upgraded the MB.

Are these Dells using the bios name conventions? Or maybe it works better if all NICs are the same vendor/model. Ours mostly have onboard Broadcomms's and Intel cards, and they routinely flip pairs of interfaces - the sets on the motherboard and on any particular card will stay in the same order, but the order of the motherboard set and any card will be random during the install. Worse, when you move a drive to a different chassis, the old udev rules keep any of the new set from matching any old name.