Hi to all,
I'm having troubles with udev and our NICs

I use debian Etch with kernel 2.6.18 on a firewall with 5 ethernet cards.
The problem concerns the fact that udev is renaming the interface even if it
says is using the kernel name!

At boot time I see the console messages with eth[0-3] to a sundance (D-Link,
quad ethernet card), eth4 for the integrated Intel and eth5 for the 3com
card. After the login prompt the interfaces are all mixed up, on device
eth0 I found the Intel e100!!
I have modified the udev rules generator for the net avoiding the rename of
every device eth* and removed the z25_permanent-net.rules with no result.

I have also written a custom rule file as follow
KERNEL=="eth[0-9]", NAME="eth%n"

and on the udevtest it seams to work, but after the reboot I have the same
problem.

I don't want to hook the udev script to the mac-addresses because I have
more than 20 firewall like this one, each with 5/6 NICs.
I just want the udev to respect the order specified at boot time.

Why is the udev switching the devices? any hints?

Thanks
Maurizio

On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 12:01:09 +0200, Maurizio wrote:

> Hi to all,
> I'm having troubles with udev and our NICs
>
<snip>
>
> I don't want to hook the udev script to the mac-addresses because I have
> more than 20 firewall like this one, each with 5/6 NICs.
> I just want the udev to respect the order specified at boot time.
>
> Why is the udev switching the devices? any hints?
>
WAG: The kernel assigns the hardware when it sees it, apparently in
somewhat random order. Devices using different kernel modules may
also be loaded in arbitrary order.
>
> Thanks
> Maurizio
>
I only know that this problem goes away if you _do_ map through MAC
addresses. That seems less of a problem than random assignment.

--
Douglas Mayne

Thank you for the reply

> WAG: The kernel assigns the hardware when it sees it, apparently in
> somewhat random order. Devices using different kernel modules may
> also be loaded in arbitrary order.
I have found that, using an initramfs I can put the modules to be loaded in
the correct order (and the kernel respects that order) in the file
/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
but inside the initram there is also the udev with the generation rules.
So when you create an initramfs you have also to check the
z25_persistent-net.rules generated in /etc/udev/rules.d/ before creating
the initram, because that file will be used during the boot and that's
where my NICs were renamed!

I have removed that file from the initramfs and now udev is respecting the
kernel name.

Thanks again
Maurizio