FC5 on 1950: eth0 now dev1804289383?

[Kilian CAVALOTTI]

Hi, 

On Monday 02 April 2007 04:26:20 pm Darren wrote:
> Hello:
>
> I've got a weird problem on some (but not all!) of the 1950s in our
> organization with Fedora Core 5.
>
> On a base install, (2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp or after updating to
> 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5smp) eth0 appears to be on NIC 2 instead of NIC1.

It's a known issue which has been fixed in recent kernels. See 
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2006-September/027295.html

> On at least one of these hosts, upgrading to 2.6.20-1.2300.fc5smp fixes
> this. On others though, upgrading to anything of 2.6.19 or beyond
> results in eth0 disappearing all together and dev1804289383 replacing
> it.  No matter which of the NIC ports on the back I plug into, ethtool
> reports no link on either eth1 or dev1804289383.
>
> Google searches suggest that dev1804289383 is actually a wireless device
> of some kind, but that doesn't make sense here.
>
> Has anyone else seen this behavior?

Two things here:

- the devXXXX device name for eth* interfaces is typical of a wrong MAC 
address in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX. Check that the 
HWADDR value is correct and match the one provided by ifconfig. At worse, 
you can remove the HWADDR= line and restart the network to see if it fixes 
the issue.

- regarding the link detection, I also noticed the ethtool reports no link 
on eth1 (NIC2) even if the interface is up, with an IP address setup, and 
working. But it works reliably on eth0 (NIC1). It took me some time to 
understand it was not a link problem, and that I shouldn't trust ethtool 
on this. I have no further explanation, but I would suggest to try setting 
up an IP for your interface and seeing if you can ping somebody.

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian