Hi,

I've got 4 NIC's in my server (debian 5.0.2)as im attempting to set up a load balancer. I just installed 2 extra NIC's and booted, linux proceeded to rename my interfaces (side request - anyone know how to stop that from happening? i know it should only really occur when new hardware is put in).

So i went through udev and renamed my interfaces appropriately which went fine. I now have:

gig0 - internal network 1
gig1 - internal network 2
eth0 - external network 1
eth1 - external network 2

eth0/eth1 are not setup yet. Now the server was acting as a router for the 2 internal networks before i put in the 2 new NIC's but now gig0 and gig1 can't seem to communicate to their respective networks. Does anyone know why this would be ?

From the server i cannot ping the gateway for either network nor any hosts and vice-versa. The weird thing is that ifconfig is showing tx and rx bytes on the gig interfaces... the routing table seems to reflect the correct configuration. I can write it up if need be but i can't copy n paste because i can only console it

ANy help would be appreciated - did i miss something that you need to do when renaming interfaces?

if you absolutely sure about ur route table check for firewall .
if firewall is configured correctly and your other side that you want to ping is pingable ,so i'm sure something wrong is with ur routing table.

it sounds firewall related. But iptables -L shows nothing....

my route table looks like this:

net gateway netmask
10.1.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 gig0
10.1.2.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 gig1
0.0.0.0 10.1.2.254 0.0.0.0 gig1

Now when i ping the networks i get destination unreachable from their respective (local) NIC's on the server. Bear in mind that this was communicating perfectly fine before i changed the interface names from eth0/eth1 - gig0/gig1. Are the interfaces referenced in some other config that i don't know about?

/etc/network/interfaces?

Yep that's configured. My IP's are statically assigned via the /etc/network/interfaces config file

edit: if i unplug the cables ifconfig still shows the interfaces as UP....
also apparently if I "ifdown gig1" it doesn't exist... gah ! >_<

Any other ideas before i go and re-install ?

What happens if you do /etc/init.d/networking stop | start | restart?

Oh yeah, and if you start adding new pci cards, udev may change the id of a card that was already installed.

yeah udev did, which is why i went down the route of setting names for them

start/stop and restarting the network is successful but doesn't change anything - still unable to communicate.

i just ended up reinstalling as i needed to get it functional again - all working now (same config just minus the interface name change).

if anyone has any other ideas post them up here for future ppl who might have the same problem.

Cheers