RE: Vexing Behavior: RHEL 5.2 (2.6.18-92) RandomNIC Enumeration Between Reboots

You actually *can* use HWADDR with bonds - but for determining the value
which you should put to HWADDR for ifcfg-eth*, you need to inspect the
interfaces with ifconfig while the network is down. (/etc/init.d/network
stop) We are using this successfully on many systems.

Regards,
        Daniel
 

-----Original Message-----
From: rhelv5-list-bounces-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:rhelv5-list-bounces-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf 
Of John Zornig
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 2:14 AM
To: rhelv5-list-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] Vexing Behavior: RHEL 5.2 (2.6.18-92)
RandomNIC Enumeration Between Reboots

John Haxby wrote:

> We were talking about this here the other day. You obviously know 
> about the issues of hardware discovery changing from one kernel 
> release to another and the whether you do a breadth-first search or a 
> depth-first search.
> The particular case we were talking about was that the hardware 
> doesn't do PCI device detection in a deterministic fashion under some 
> circumstances. It's not quite random, but it's variable enough to 
> bevexing. I'm afraid you're stuck with using HWADDR in the ifcfg-
> eth* files or using a similar device uuid to distinguish one NIC from 
> another. We suspect that this random behaviour will become the norm in

> future.
> jch
I have a number of Dell systems, running RHEL5.2 suffering badly from
this issue. They all have two on-board NICs and one or two 2-port or 4-
port PCI cards.

I can't set HWADDR in the ifcfg-eth* files because most of the NICs are
in bonded pairs and it is the ifcfg-bond* which has a HWADDR which is
shared between the two NICs which are slaves to that bond*.

I've just discovered the pci=bfsort kernel parameter yesterday and begun
to configure it on the systems, but it is too early to say if it works,
as the issue is random at boot time.

I had no luck configuring udev/rules.d to do HWADDR matching using rules
like:
KERNEL=="eth*",DRIVER=="bnx2",SYSFS{address}=="00:1d:09:1e:b0:a9",
NAME="eth0"
It seemed to be ignored.

JZ

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