[CentOS] machine with 2 ethernet cards e1000 and forcedeth

Thu Aug 30 21:10:06 UTC 2007
Shawn K. O'Shea <shawn at ll.mit.edu>


Jerry Geis wrote:
> I am using centos 5 x86_64 AMD64 X2 4200+. I am current on yum update.
>
> My machine has two ethernet cards. e1000 (eth0) and forcedeth (eth1)
[snip]
> How can I get this connection to RELIABLY come up
> each time as eth0 is e1000 and eth1 is forcedeth
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jerry
>
 From the RHEL4 docs (also applicable to C5): 
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/ref-guide/s1-networkscripts-interfaces.html

HWADDR=<MAC-address>, where <MAC-address> is the hardware address of the 
Ethernet device in the form AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF. This directive is useful 
for machines with multiple NICs to ensure that the interfaces are 
assigned the correct device names regardless of the configured load 
order for each NIC's module. This directive should /not/ be used in 
conjunction with MACADDR.

You can get the mac address from running ifconfig. The HWADDR setting 
goes in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (and ifcfg-eth1) 
files. (the setting either doesn't exist, or may be transposed and 
causing your problems)

-Shawn