[lbo-talk] ubuntu stuff

[Charles Grimes]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 10:47 -0400, Les Schaffer wrote:
> Charles Grimes wrote:
> > Now the Illiad and then the Odyssey. 
> >   
> 
> moral of this story: track your mac addresses ... pull one card, boot 
> the system, note the mac address ... then insert second card, boot 
> again, note the second mac address, and the mapping of device names 
> (ethX) to mac address.
> 
> the way that eth0 and eth1 are assigned to the NICs depends on the 
> kernel (2.6 vs earlier) and module setup and PCI bus.
> 
> if you are using an up to date kernel, you can use udev to assign ethX 
> to a specific MAC address.
> 
> this is not so simple, even Dell has a white paper about it: 
> http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/nic-enum-whitepaper-v4.pdf
> 
> Les

Amazing. I stumbled into an engineering maze. Get this:

``The root cause of NIC enumeration mismatches is that there is
currently no industry standard to enable the OS to determine the
physical labeling of Ethernet ports on the motherboard...

...RHEL 4 Gold through Update 2, pass on the kernel command line:
ksdevice=eth1
This causes the installer to use eth1 instead of the default eth0. 
RHEL has the additional option: ksdevice=link ''

I had forgotten the nightmare of matching the machine or physical
address to device name then match the device name to a fixed internal
address via ifconfig_ed0="192.168.xx.x" Back then, I only had one
network card so only one device name was present at boot and boot read
the physical address `ed0 xx.xx.xx.xx' or something like that. 

If you or anybody else emailed me offlist, I lost all that mail. Remail
if need be. Thanks

CG