[CentOS] again, nic driver order

Sun Nov 29 17:21:18 UTC 2009
Rob Townley <rob.townley at gmail.com>

On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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Yes Les.