Not sure if these questions should be on here or the Hardware forum but please bear with me.
Question 1.
I have an ISA-based NIC which I have configured via the manufacturer’s DOS tool. It is seen by pnpdump and by yast2.
Now, in yast2, the card is there and I can configure it as far as an IP address etc goes but no options to the module (3c509).
Apart from the card taking a different IRQ and IO port to the one I configured it with, it works just fine until…
I reboot. The card is there, its IRQ and IO port resources are reserved for it but it’s not up - ifconfig -a shows only eth0 and lo. However, if I load yast2 and select “Network Devices”, ping! the card is up (as eth1) and running without me touching anything!
Tracing the network startup script (init.d/network), I see that the cause is that eth1 (the ISA card) is not in the /sys/class/net directory at the time the script is running. It is in the /etc/sysconfig/network directory - at least its “ifcfg” is and that’s, I assume where yast2 stores the config for it.
The script uses /sys/class/net to define the interfaces that are “available” but /etc/sysconfig/network to define “mandatory” interfaces.
The script brings up the “available” interfaces (eth0 and lo) but then reports error of eth1 being required but not there.
Launching yast2 magically puts the eth1 entry in /sys/class/net and brings the interface alive.
What’s the voodoo here? What is yast doing that I can’t. I’ve tried “ifup” but it complains that the interface is not there.
Okay. Question 2.
I had 2 x PCI-based NICs in another box. I removed one and deleted it via yast2. The remaining one stubbornly gets configured as eth1 all the time and I can’t find a way, via yast2, to switch it to eth0. I can see in the boot.msg that it starts as eth0 (kernel) but is then renamed to eth1 some time later on.
Not a problem whilst it’s single-homed but I will need to dual-home it shortly. Any tips on getting this NIC to be eth0?
Cheers and TIA