I'm installing 4.7 on some new Supermicro servers (X8DTN+ boards). (We will roll out 5.x later, but can't do that until testing against all apps is complete. We need these servers "last week".)
These use an Intel NIC not supported in base 4.7 . I manually install from a stock 4.7 DVD, then load the driver source from Intel, build for 4.7 base, then upgrade the kernel to 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp and copy drivers built against that kernel. When booting the base 4.7 kernel, I allow kudzu to configure both NICs with DHCP because it seems to randomly pick which one will be eth0. (Only NIC 1 is cabled). Oddly enough the base kernel sees the devices as needing the igp driver but the 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp kernel sees them as e1000e. When I boot into 2.6.9-78.0.22.ELsmp I start in single user mode, and adjust the ifcfg-eth? files to have eth0 use the lower MAC address and eth1 to have no MAC address and not boot. Then I reboot (to avoid problems with prefetched files). On three of the five systems I installed so far this worked fine. On the other two, the network service says "device not found" for eth0. When I look at the output of "lspci -v" both ethernets have the same MAC address. Three questions: 1) How does this happen? 2) What do I do to get the behavior I want, avoiding the problem? 3) How can I fix the two systems that are hosed? The standard solutions (ifconfig, ethtool, GNU mac changer) all require use of the software device name (e.g., eth0) but eth0 has not been assigned because the device is "not found". Thanks, Miles