[rhelv6-list] RHEL 6.4 udev just butchered my ethernet device names!

[Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) discussion mailing-list]

On 02/21/13 11:08, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) discussion mailing-list wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Just did my first update of RHEL6.4 and experienced a very painful issue with udev renaming
> ethernet devices.  Unfortunately, I did not capture the initial udev ethernet rules prior to the
> reboot.  My system has an onboard NIC and a PCIE card.
>
> 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
> 01:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5754 Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express
> (rev 02)
>
> With RHEL6.3, I had
>   eth0 <-- motherboard NIC
>   p1p1 <-- port 0 of PCIE card
>   p1p2 <-- port 1 of PCIE card
>
> I rebooted and this came to the messages:
>
> Feb 21 10:34:59 d0 kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth2 to rename4
> Feb 21 10:34:59 d0 kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth2
> Feb 21 10:34:59 d0 kernel: udev: renamed network interface rename4 to eth0
>
> I needed up with
>    eth1 <-- port 1 of the PCIE card
>    eth2 <-- port 0 of the PCIE card
>
> I repaired my /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files and rebooted again and now got this:
>
> Feb 21 11:47:48 d0 kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth1 to eth2
>
> and the order is a bit different again!  Anybody else having issues like I am?  Are the pXpX names
> no longer being used?
>
> thanks,
>    daryl
>

Reading through the RHEL 6.4 tech notes, stumbled across this in
Chapter 4.1 (known issues):

   kernel component
     Recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 releases use a new naming scheme for
     network interfaces on some machines. As a result, the installer may
     use different names during an upgrade in certain scenarios (typically
     em 1 is used instead of eth0 on new Dell machines). However,
     the previously used network interface names are preserved on the
     system and the upgraded system will still use the previously used
     interfaces. This is not the case for Yum upgrades.

.. so using the install media to upgrade preserves device names, but on
*some* machines upgrading using yum will clobber device names.
Known issue, but no bugzilla entry cited.  It would have been nice if
they pointed to a more detailed description of how & when this happens.

Good luck,
-Bob Arendt