doug laidlaw

I am running Mandriva Spring on a Sempron system on a Gigabyte mobo with
onboard Ethernet. Each time I boot up, a fresh ethernet interface is
generated. I am up to No. 9. The previous ones are just sitting there
slowing the boot process, as it waits for each in turn to come up. I tried
deleting earlier ones, but although they were said to be deleted, they were
still in the list.

Mandriva 2007.0 would not run on this mobo. The Ethernet port wasn't
detected, the CD-ROM was invisible, and it insisted on giving the old IDE
drive priority over the SATA drive (it still does.) Apart from the above,
I am quite happy with 2007.1.

Doug.
--
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people
who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
--Dale Carnegie

david w. hodgins

What does ifconfig -a show for the mac address? What (if anything) is
in /etc/iftab, and /etc/udev/rules.d/61-net_config.rules ?

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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david mathog

Specifically, if you imaged the machine from another one, or changed
ethernet cards, /etc/iftab will still hold the old MAC address and that
will cause the machine to ignore that entry during boot and create a new
one. /etc/iftab is created by the Mandriva installer, but it isn't
actually needed on a single interface machine, and the only thing it
seems to do is trigger this bug. I've seen this before, but thankfully
mine only went up to eth1. In any case, the solution is:

rm -f /etc/iftab
rm -f /etc/udev/rules.d/61-net_config.rules
rm -f /etc/sysconfig/ifcfg-eth*
reboot

iftab will not be recreated, 61-net_config.rules and ifcfg-eth0 will be,
and then everything should be back to normal on subsequent reboots.

Regards,

David Mathog

david w. hodgins

That one should be
rm -f /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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doug laidlaw

Thanks to you both. This is a new install, but I have copi3ed across my
settings in $HOME - shouldn't affect it. I did read something about MAC
addresses, but it is all Greek to me. MAC addresses could be stored in the
router as well.

I will let you know how I get on.

Doug.
--
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
- Aristotle.

doug laidlaw

That worked perfectly. eth0 came up without hesitation. No need to touch
the router. But I am counting up from eth0 again. My computer is now assigned
192.168.1.7 instead of 192.168.1.2, but that is no problem. There are only 2 workstations, and the numbers don't matter.

Doug.
--
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
- Peter E. Drucker.

david w. hodgins

Something's still wrong. You don't want to have to cleanup the eth* entries
every few reboots.

Get a copy of Bit Twister's script from
http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.os.linux.mandriva/browse_frm/thread/27ddaf8a6988ea27/f4cf6e00fd859dcb?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1

Post the results here, and maybe we can figure out why it isn't staying
with eth0.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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doug laidlaw

My previous post came out badly. I typed it in instalments.

What I meant to say was: The fix worked, but in the long term, it simply
reset the count to zero. It didn't stop the adding of an interface on each
reboot.

Doug.
--
All we are given is possibilities - to make of ourselves one thing or
another.
- Ortega y Gasset

david mathog

Right, I typed it wrong. Thanks for correcting the error.

David Mathog

david mathog

Hmm, interesting. Please provide some more details:

1. Verify that there is only ONE ethernet on this machine. (Not that
you are using just one, but that there exists only one network
device. If you have wireless, that's a network device too.) If
you have two or more network devices then you do need /etc/iftab
and it has to have the right values in it to consistently assign
eth0 to one MAC, eth1 to the other MAC. When there is only one
ethernet you can live without /etc/iftab. I'm thinking now that
maybe you have two or more devices and they aren't coming up in
the same order each time, resulting in earlier eth* settings
being ignored and new ones created.
2. Show the contents of /etc/sysconfig/network
3. Show the contents of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*
4. Show the results of:
ifconfig | grep eth
on several boots.
5. Any other possibly relevant hardware details.

Regards,

David Mathog