Re: [gentoo-user] new mobo : Eth0 recovered

[Stroller]

On 21 April 2012, at 15:25, Philip Webb wrote:

> 120421 Dale wrote:
>> Philip Webb wrote:
>>> You actually have to remove the offensive file
>>> from the dir, not simply rename it to 'xx70xx...' !
>> That's the same way files in /etc/portage/ works too.
>> I do wish we could put a # on the front to make it ignore files.
>> We can dream I guess.
>
> Yes & why did it start doing this only with the new mobo
> -- was it provoked by seeing an unknown driver ?
> And whyever did it want to rename the device to 'eth1' ??

Because it knows the NIC with the MAC address of 11:22:33:aa:bb:cc always has to be eth0. 

It found a new NIC, and eth0 wasn't available for the new NIC.
So the new NIC was granted the first available etcX allocation.

This is a real pain if you insist on thinking about it in terms of "I always expect there to be an eth0" or "the first card should always be eth0". 

But if you were to slap a second NIC into the system and - hey! - suddenly the original network card didn't work any more because they've been allocated the wrong way around, then this would make perfect sense to you.

I mean, you could find yourself sorting that problem out, then the next time you reboot the two interfaces swap identities again (either randomly or for some obscure reasons that I can imagine) - that's really problematic if the two are now physically connected to different networks the wrong way around and you're firewalled out from them. This applies especially if you're hundreds of miles away from the machine which, from experience, happens far more often than one might wish or imagine (although I guess, to be fair, it only takes 1 or 2 or 3 occasions per decade for this to be far too bleedin' often). 

It is really freakin' useful to know that an interface number is *always* going to match up with the server's physical socket marked "net1".

Stroller.