I'm installing 4.7 on some new Supermicro servers (X8DTN+ boards).
(We will roll out 5.x later, but can't do that until testing against
all apps is complete.  We need these servers "last week".)

These use an Intel NIC not supported in base 4.7 .  I manually install
from a stock 4.7 DVD, then load the driver source from Intel, build for
4.7 base, then upgrade the kernel to 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp and copy drivers
built against that kernel.

When booting the base 4.7 kernel, I allow kudzu to configure
both NICs with DHCP because it seems to randomly pick which one will
be eth0.  (Only NIC 1 is cabled).

Oddly enough the base kernel sees the devices as needing the igp
driver but the 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp kernel sees them as e1000e.

When I boot into 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp I start in single user mode, and
adjust the ifcfg-eth? files to have eth0 use the lower MAC address and
eth1 to have no MAC address and not boot.  Then I reboot (to avoid
problems with prefetched files).  On three of the five systems I installed
so far this worked fine.  On the other two, the network service says
"device not found" for eth0.  When I look at the output of "lspci -v"
both ethernets have the same MAC address.

Three questions:
1) How does this happen?
2) What do I do to get the behavior I want, avoiding the problem?
3) How can I fix the two systems that are hosed?

The standard solutions (ifconfig, ethtool, GNU mac changer) all require
use of the software device name (e.g., eth0) but eth0 has not been assigned
because the device is "not found".

Thanks,
Miles