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