[CentOS] network config files in centos 5 changing

[Bart Schaefer]

On 4/25/07, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote:
>
> ifcfg-eth1 keeps changing to DHCP. All my static setup is gone.
>
> Why is it doing this? How can I stop it?

I had exactly this problem with CentOS 4 on a machine that has 2
onboard NICs plus a third NIC on a card.  Now if I can just remember
what I did ...

The problem (as I recall) is that on each reboot the onboard NICs are
being discovered in a different order, so the MAC addresses in
/etc/sysconfig/hwconf don't match what is recorded in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*.

I believe what I had to do (I should have written it down, damn it)
was hand-edit /etc/sysconfig/hwconf to completely remove all the
references to the NICs (there may be more than one entry for each NIC
because of the flip-flopping), edit ifcfg-eth* to remove all
references to HWADDR, reboot again to let the cards be rediscovered,
and then again hand-edit ifcfg-eth* to insert HWADDR lines that match
the device assignments in the regenerated /etc/sysconfig/hwconf.

However, I may have at least the last step of that wrong.