On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Michael Di Domenico <mdidomenico4@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What I'm curious about is how/why Linux actually decides Nic1 should be Eth0? > > My theory is it starts on the lowest MAC address and works up, > depending partly on driver load order. I may be spewing misinformation here, but my understanding of how this works is that the specific ordering is pretty much random. It's rather unlikely to be based on MAC address value, except accidentally; it's probably just whatever comes up first when it enumerates the interfaces, which could easily be timing-dependent. (From personal experience, two identical but physically separate NICs will come up in a different order on every boot. Your case may be more consistent.) The first time it does this, though, it records the MAC address into the appropriate ifcfg-* script. From then on, at boot time it checks the MAC address of each interface as it comes up. If it mismatches with what is recorded in the ifcfg-* script, then it skips that name and tries using the next. In other words, all you should have to do is set HWADDR appropriately in the the ifcfg-* scripts and it should do the right thing. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
