----- Original Message -----

From: "John Hodrien" J.H.Hodrien@leeds.ac.uk To: "CentOS mailing list" centos@centos.org Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2011 9:08:09 AM Subject: Re: [CentOS] is there a way to make the kernel see a new ethernet device without rebooting?

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011, Jon Detert wrote:

...

I have a VMWare ESX server with virtual machines running CentOS. I want to add an ethernet interface to one of the CentOS virtual machines. VMWare allowed me to add a virtual NIC to the CentOS virtual machine while it was running. However, the CentOS o.s. cannot see the new NIC. Is there a command I can run to make the kernel aware of the new ethernet device? I don't want to reboot the CentOS o.s. if I don't have to

Adding a NIC to VMWare with a CentOS 6 guest (e1000) works just fine here. I

Adding the NIC in VMWare works fine for me too. It's just that the guest (CentOS) o.s. doesn't see the new NIC unless/until I reboot it.

don't remember there being any problems with CentOS 5.

Does dmesg show evidence of the new device being attached?

No.

I wonder if it has to do with the type of NIC. In my case, vmware says it's of type 'flexible', and the CentOS o.s uses the 'pcnet32' driver for it.

- JD

I wonder if it has to do with the type of NIC.  In my case, vmware says it's of type 'flexible', and the CentOS o.s uses the 'pcnet32' driver for it.

Try: modprobe pcnet32

or if the module is already loaded rmmod pcnet32 modprobe pcnet32

Radu