[CentOS] again, nic driver order

Sun Nov 29 16:57:32 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Rob Townley wrote:
> 
> NIC ordering is a problem. Some say it is the multi cpu, some say bad
> BIOS, some say MAC address ordering is better, some say PCI bus
> enumeration is better.  The netdev mailing list has had a long running
> discussion on this issue.  The CTO of Dell and members of HP along
> with others are / were active participants.  Part of the problem is
> that an alias name may not be available to the kernel.
> 
> Dell has their own software to bring determinism to NIC ordering.
> http://linux.dell.com/papers.shtml
> 
> One of Dell's programmers has proposed changing Anaconda to let you
> choose at installation time the NIC naming convention:
> 
> We have been having discussions in the netdev list about creating
> multiple names for the network interfaces to bring determinism into
> the way network interfaces are named in the OSes. In specific, "eth0
> in the OS does not always map to the integrated NIC Gb1 as labelled on
> the chassis".
> 
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&m=125510301513312&w=2 - (Re: PATCH:
> Network Device Naming mechanism and policy)
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&m=125619338904322&w=2 - ([PATCH]
> udev: create empty regular files to represent net)
>

Do any of these approaches help with the scenario where you want to clone a 
system across many identical machines including future additions where you don't 
know the MAC addresses yet, and you'd like the remote operator to be able to 
insert a drive and have it come up with the right interfaces on the right 
network connections?  This was possible in Centos 3.x, but not in 5.x.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com