On 11/22/2009 8:38 PM, Gordon McLellan wrote: > I have two servers with identical hardware ... TYAN i3210w system > boards with dual intel gigabit interfaces, and a PCI intel gigabit > nic. I'm running Centos 5.4, x86_64, 2.6.18-164.6.1.el5 > > Every other time I reboot, the nics initialize in a different order. On the servers where I'm currently using bonding... (this is what Ross Walker said on the 23rd). Here's an example for a server w/ 4 total NICs, bonded into a pair of pairs. /etc/modprobe.conf alias eth0 tg3 alias eth1 tg3 alias eth2 forcedeth alias eth3 forcedeth alias scsi_hostadapter sata_nv # BONDING # Set general bonding options (allows multiple bonds) options bonding max_bonds=2 # Define the two bonds alias bond0 bonding alias bond1 bonding /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 DEVICE=eth0 BOOTPROTO=none HWADDR=00:16:36:##:##:## ONBOOT=yes MASTER=bond0 SLAVE=yes USERCTL=no TYPE=Ethernet /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 DEVICE=bond0 BOOTPROTO=none ONBOOT=yes USERCTL=no TYPE=Ethernet BONDING_OPTS="mode=1 miimon=100" NETWORK=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn NETMASK=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn IPADDR=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn GATEWAY=nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn Basically, we create (1) file for each ethernet interface under /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts (ifcfg-eth0, ifcfg-eth1, ifcfg-eth2, ifcfg-eth3), then we create (1) file for each bonded interface there as well (ifcfg-bond0, ifcfg-bond1). Bond membership is defined in the ifcfg-eth# files, while the bond options are defined in the ifcfg-bond# file. You can find out MACs by looking /etc/sysconfig/hwconf.