The formula that ended up working for me: undo modifications to udev rules comment out the alias ethX lines that anaconda had placed in my modprobe.conf use HWADDR= in the ifcfg-ethX config files. slave interfaces have onboot=yes in them, despite no IP address information The nics are correctly initialized every boot now, and everything works as expected with the bonding driver. I even have vlans created on the bonded interface. Gordon