[VLAN] PCI Nic card detection and naming sequence

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:05:43 +0100
Gary Smith <gary at pbltd.net> wrote:

> 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

You need to use one of the utilities that renames interfaces based on mac
addresses.  Fedora/Redhat does this via ifcfg-ethX scripts that are managed
by the network configuration GUI. Other distro's use udev or iftab.