Cobbler version: 2.0.11 (actually 2.0.11-2 from RPM) All systems: RHEL 5.8
[Preliminary: I realise our cobbler version is a little old. I'd rather not have to upgrade right now, but if it really would make a substantial difference to the problem I am about to describe, that could be done.] We install RHEL 5.8 on many IBM boxes, which are all very similar. In particular there are four ethernet ports on the system itself, and a separate board with two 10-Gig ports. The first ethernet port is our provisioning network, over which cobbler runs. During installation, it seems to call this "eth2". But after installation it almost always comes up as "eth0". (That's OK (although I don't understand it!) but it might interact slightly with the real problem below.) Moving on... After installation, the four system ethernet ports usually get assigned names eth0, eth1, eth2 and eth3, usually in order. (The cobbler/provisioning interface seems to get "eth0" always.) The two 10-Gig ports get assigned names eth4 and eth5... usually. But occasionally (perhaps 10% or slightly more) an installation ends up with a different mapping of names to ports. (If we then re-install, it usually gets the expected mapping.) That is a problem when one is (re-)installing machines in a farm of machines that are supposed to be the same. I realise that "cobbler system" has a "--interface" capability. But I don't see a way for that to be used to map specific names to specific hardware. I make no claims to understand the depths and intricacies of "/etc/modprobe.conf", "/etc/sysconfig/hwconf", kudzu, etc. But is there a way (or common practice) somehow to pre-populate various things with relevant information for the mapping of generated "eth*" names onto particular ethernet ports? Ideally such a mechanism would interrogate the hardware to determine a characteristic of 10-Gig ports (which we want as "eth4" and "eth5"; the order doesn't matter) and it could then pre-populate some sort of hint for something like kudzu. Or something vaguely like that. I guess this might go as a cobbler post-install snippet. Or perhaps as some action for very soon after freshly installed system boots. Hints, snippets, etc. welcome! -- David Lee, ECMWF, UK. _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list cobbler@lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler
