Interfaces change randomly on each boot

[l. ray herbig]

Hello. I'm running into an interesting issue. I have an HP DL380 G4. OS is Centos 5. I just recently updated the system including the kernel to the latest release. Now when I boot the system, the interfaces change location. I have two internal nics and a pci dual nic card. The interfaces are defined eth0 - eth3. The modprobe.conf shows the e1000 driver for eth0 and eth1 and the tg3 driver for eth2 and eth3. When I boot mii-tool will show link activity on eth0 and eth1. If I reboot mii-tool will show link activity on eth2 and eth3. Another reboot changes the activity to eth1 and eth2. Finally another reboot brings the activity back to eth0 and eth1. Not only is link activity changing, the MACs jump around as well. I tried booting the old kernel and it still did the same. The pci path isn't changing. Could it be the drivers are hosed and need to be reinstalled. For giggles I updated another DL 380 G4 and it did the same thing. The DL380 G5 appears to work ok after update. Just wandering if anyone has seen this behavior.

Thanks.
Ray

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Ray,

There is a hardware problem there. Boot to diagnostics and you will find trouble with the NIC cards or system board.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Ray,

There is a hardware problem there. Boot to diagnostics and you will find trouble with the NIC cards or system board.

Alternatively you need to update the firmware on the G4 systems.

SEP

[Mike (Sinew)]

Hi Ray,

it doesn't have to be a hardware problem. It depends on how you configured the network adapters. Please check /etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules. It should contain entries like: 'SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", SYSFS{address}=="00:01:02:03:04:05", IMPORT="/sbin/rename_netiface %k eth0"'. The SYSFS should contain the MAC address. The order of network adapters can be different on reboots, depending on when a module is loaded. This can be different, because of processes taken longer to load on one reboot and shorter on others. So, just add entries with the right MAC address for eth0-eth3 in this file and you should be ok.

By the way, the location of this file might be different under Centos, I use SuSE Linux, just search for the udev directory.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Use the HWADDR in the ifcfg-ethX configuration file. For more information see:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/ref-guide/s1-networkscripts-interfaces.html

[l. ray herbig]

Forcing the MAC in with HWADDR did the trick. I imagine the udev rules would've done the same thing. Its strange because I've never had to hardcode the MAC before.

Thanks!