[VLAN] PCI Nic card detection and naming sequence

[Gary Smith]

HI All,

These is an off topic question/s but I am not sure what forum I should 
be asking these questions of.

1. What forum I should be sending this request too.
2. If someone knows the answer and has the time to tell please do so.

We have a fedora 5 box we ship with multiple NIC cards. Some up to 6 for 
special business centre applications.

When these are are mixture of onboard MB Nics and PCI Nics, the boot 
sequence the eth number specified for then on first boot changes on 
subsequent boots. They effectively get mixed up.

We used to use RH 7.2 and it did not do this, every system built 
detected PCI devices in same order. Since Fedora 2 (cannot tell about in 
between versions) this PCI detection sequence has been random for Nic 
cards.

I cannot believe fedora is meant to do this since if you built a fedora 
firewall with 2+ Nics and installed it, if the Nics get swaped on boot, 
then we cannot have someone swapping cables.

Does anyone know or had any problems like this.  We get round it by 
writing code to detect the NIC cards once settled and make sure this 
sequence is kept on all subsequent boots.

We are currently using stock Fedora 5 - updated with 2.6.17 kernel. 
Earlier kernels did same.

Thanks

Gary