starting Fedora Server SIG

[Les Mikesell]

Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 13:24 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Agreed, but when the kernel hardware detection order was predictable, 
>> this was simple.  Now it isn't.
> 
> When was it predictable?  Even in the 2.4 era, we'd get one chassis
> barebones from a vender like supermicro and the nic order would be one
> way, then next month we'd order the same chassis barebones and the nics
> would be picked up in a different order.  Even more fun is when they'd
> change with a kernel update, so that the kernel we installed with had
> one order, and the kernel we updated to and rebooted to had it in a
> different order.

I'm pretty sure I cloned Centos 3.x across at least 50 IBM 336's with 
the NICs always being chosen in the same order.  The thing that really 
took me by surprise, though, was some mid-rev update (and I can't 
remember now if this was still 3.x or a later version) where the 
previously ignored HWADDR entries in the ifcfg-eth? files started being 
observed just to the point of not bringing up an interface that didn't 
match.  This was fun when the local test box didn't exhibit the problem 
but all of the remote headless boxes that previously worked fell off the 
network when rebooted.  I just happened to be in the right place by a 
console that happened to be connected to catch it one of the first times 
it happened.   I suppose that change was really a bugfix and it was 
supposed to work that way from the beginning but it wasn't what I 
expected in an update from an 'enterprise' version.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com