There's always the possibility that it's a hardware/bios issue. Some
hardware doesn't maintain it's PnP database correctly and or it gets
corrupted and reset (perhaps by a power outage etc...)...

You may notice that AMI/Award/Phoenix bios's tend to treat IRQ layouts and
PnP a bit differently.

I've seen this behavior before as well, but only with RH9 and lower, and
older hardware. I seem to remember Award bios's giving me the most trouble
in this respect. However, very old AMI bios's had severe PnP issues with
linux. When your video card irq jumps around, you REALLY know you have a
buggy bios!

Just a thought.. maybe a bios update might alleviate some of this. Also,
some boards allow you to manually assign irq's to the various PCI ports.
This can also help.

Michael Joy
HEP - University of Mississippi
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom
Rockwell
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 2:49 PM
To: Ken Teh
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: NICs on SL 3x

I don't know when it was added, but the configuration files 
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 eth1 etc. have a variable 
"HWADDR".  There is some logic in the ifup script that looks to me (just 
a quick reading) to be meant to insure that if the interface comes up 
with the right name.

I've have SL303 on a couple machines with two NICs with the HWADDR 
defined, and haven't had any problems.  I guess that the discovery order 
could be weird at install time and then anaconda would create the 
ifcfg-ethX files with bad HWADDR values, but other than that, I think 
the scripts have this problem eliminated...

Tom Rockwell
Michigan State U.

Ken Teh wrote:

>On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Miles O'Neal wrote:
>
>  
>
>>We haven't tried multiple NICs on SL yet.
>>But on RH 8 (current production environment)
>>when you boot a system with multiple NICs,
>>they may get activated in a different order
>>each time, resulting in severe network issues
>>when IPs are suddenly on the wrong subnets.
>>
>>Has this been resolved in EL/SL?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Miles
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Miles,
>
>NICs are activated in order eth0, eth1, ...  What gets called eth0, eth1, 
>... is determined by the order in which they are "discovered" which is 
>usually just the PCI order on the motherboard.
>
>Ken
>  
>