Strange Ethernet Problem on FC5 x86 (port changes randomly once rebooted!)

[Jake Angulo]

Guys,

This problem is blowing me away, i really wonder if somebody else has
experienced this.  No errors at all!
But what is strange is the behavior of my ethernet ports.

OS: FC5 i386  kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5.i686.rpm
Machine: Dell Poweredge w/ 2 broadcom gb ethernet, and 2 intel 10/100
ethernet.

So basically, i have:  eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3

What happens is that for every random "n" times i reboot my machine, my
network interface assignments (eth0, eth1, eth2, eth3) seem to be be
randomly interchanged!
ie: eth0 before reboot, becomes eth3 or eth1 after reboot, and so on!
At first i thought one port was defective, but then i realized what was
happening when i tried to physically move the UTP cable from one port to
another, and miraculously i can now ping what used to be my logical port,
magically transferred to another physical port!

I can't backout and reinstall another version now, I have already fully
configured the machine, with all webhosting apps that we're running, and all
necessary bloody configs done.
I have tried to manually change the IPs/interfaces, by editing the
appropriate /etc files (i definitely know which files), i also tried through
"setup" on the prompt, system-config-networking, and even via XWindows
network admin tool.  I even tried disabling all the rest of the eth, leaving
only one.  I think i tried all humanely possible things.

Note, that this machine is a proven machine (stable under RH9, until i
reinstalled OS to FC5). I have other machines that are stable under FC4,
running on prod environment w/ an ave of 150 hosted domains in each.  I just
rebooted remotely a while ago, and now i cant enter my machine because i
already know whats happening. Of course it booted up --- the only thing to
do to access it is to unplug the UTP cable, and plug it to wherever port is
now active.  Isnt this crazy?!

Pls help!  Any suggestions, or thoughts, or links to solutions would be very
highly appreciated.

Thanks!

Jake
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