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

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2006, Jake Angulo wrote:

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

What version of initscripts?  The latest for FC5 is 
initscripts-8.31.6-1.i386.rpm.  Between the original release and this one, 
there was a fix included for this issue.

BTW, device naming bugs showed up in FC6 as well.  initscripts-8.45.7-1 in 
updates-testing is supposed to fix them.

>
> Thanks!
>
> Jake
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs