Ethernet device, where art thou?
Today I lost my Ethernet devices, probably as a result of upgrading the apartment server from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10. The culprit turned out to be the service responsible for dynamic device management – udev. These symptoms started showing up in the logfile:
Dec 16 07:26:12 server kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth2
Dec 16 07:26:12 server kernel: udev: renamed network interface eth1 to eth5
The udev daemon creates and renames devices according to configuration files in /etc/udev/rules.d/ called rules. One of them – 70-persistent-net.rules – specifically handles network devices. This file was screwed up badly by Anaconda, and had dupes and network devices from a previous hardware configuration. I cleaned up this file, so it had only contained rules that matched the hardware addresses of the installed network devices:
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:50:da:21:e3:34″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth1″
SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTR{address}==”00:01:02:24:6d:91″, ATTR{type}==”1″, KERNEL==”eth*”, NAME=”eth2″
Various external “plug-and-play” helpers may add newly found network devices to this file, so if your network devices start changing names, you might want to check /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.
