rhel4 detects NICs in reverse on a 2950

[David Sparks]

I too was annoyed by the incorrect labeling of the NIC ports, but I've
got things sorted out now.  This is my guess as to how this happened.

Originally the NICs were correctly labeled 0 and 1.  However when one of
the final x950 prototypes was being reviewed by a senior marketing
executive he noticed this and said "There is no effing way we are
releasing this with the Internet[sic] ports labeled starting at 0!  This
needs to be fixed, relabel them as 1 and 2."

So an emergency fix change order went out, was approved and went out
back to the design dept where a junior worker loaded up the design in a
CAD program and simply changed the 0 to a 2.  While this correctly
relabeled the ports 1 and 2, it had the side effect of reversing the
order of the ports.

Production was started without anyone noticing this mistake and when it
was noticed it was too late, someone proposed to fix it in the drivers.
 The Windows driver team reversed the order of the ports in the driver.
 This is why in Windows the NIC ports are in the correct order.  However
the linux kernel team rejected this nonsense because these machines use
the general Broadcom bnx2 driver that is being used by other vendors.
Reversing the ports would affect everyone using Broadcom NeteXtreme2
hardware.  So the linux change never happened.

That is why the ports are reversed in linux.  If you could get a vanilla
Broadcom NeteXtreme2 driver loaded in Windows I'd bet that the ports
would be reversed.

ds