[CentOS] Forcing ifcfg-eth0 to use the same nic in multi nic machine

Mon Aug 13 18:38:04 UTC 2007
Doug Coats <dcoatshca at gmail.com>

I am new to CentOS (coming from Fedora) and I really like it!

I am having difficulty getting one of my machines to boot and assign
the same designation of eth0 and eth1 to the same nics consistantly.

I have an MSI motherboard with 2 nics on the board.  Strangely enough
both nics report the same MAC address.  This is not an issue since I
use the computer to route between two different subnets so they don't
see each other on the network.

The problem comes when I reboot and they race against each other to
see which one will get to be eth0.  If they switch my routing dies and
I loose access with out rebooting and hoping they switch back or
switching the actual cables.

I have googled and searched my networking resources but all of the
fixes that I have found focus on using the MAC address to solve the
problem but in my case they are the same.

The only difference is that they use different drivers.  One is a
Realtek and other is a Marvell.

I have turned off Kudzu or they reconfigured every time a booted the
machine.  It only happens every once in a while but I need it to be
consistent.

Any suggestions or pushes in the right direction would be most appreciated.

Doug Coats