NIC identification under FC5
 

Hi all,

I am having a problem under fedora with multiple network interfaces installed. I am unable to reliably set the aliases for cards where there is more than one card using the same module installed in the system. For example I have 2 3com 3C905's installed in a basic firewall server as eth0 and eth1, and I am finding that almost every other boot, eth0 and eth1 have been swapped - ie. the card which the system used to have assigned eth0 has suddenly become the card which was assigned eth1, and vice-versa. Subsequently, all hell breaks loose with the system config and nothing works, and I have to start troubleshooting to figure out what is going on yet again. Everything else about this system is stable; linux is brilliant for this. I only have this one difficulty with system configuration stability, specifically network card configuration stability. Surely there must be some way to tell it which of my two 3Com cards is eth0, and make it STAY eth0?

Any help is appreciated!

Regards,
David

I have seen the same problem and it was certainly irritating. What I did was to remove all the information about the devices. From the Network configuration applet deselect the profile checkbox and then delete the devices restart the network and then add the devices back and finally restart the network.

On the install I had it had got the MAC address confused between the two devices. I don't know if this will fix your problem but it did solve it for the machine I was looking at.

Thanks graemef; it is interesting about the MAC addresses, I have tried entering these manually in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethx files, but I *think* (and if somebody could correct me here it would be appreciated :)) that the system will simply assign that mac address to that card, regardless of what the card's actual mac address is. So I don't think that setting the mac address can be used to reliably hard-set the device name... can somebody comment on this?

Regards,
David

Hi guys! I'm experiencing the same problem under FC5 with kernel 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 (i have NICs from different vendors). Idea regading MAC addresses to be set into system-scripts configs for each NIC seems perfect for me but one thing I don't understand is why this swapping happens *sometimes* after server reboot and not every time server restarts. I'd be appreciated if anybody could explain why such thing happens and why it doesn't happen with NICs of the same vendor (I've tested several servers with identical NICs at didn't notice the issue regarding swapping). Thanks in advance!