Current status of multi-homes machines

[Carsten Aulbert]

Hi all,

I'm currently looking again at this topic after the "old" way with 
"ip=:::::eth1" does not seem to work with 3.4.5 and Squeeze anymore.

The problem:

One machine is multi-homed, i.e. has 3 NICs, two onboard e1000e and one 10Gb 
Myricom, due to external limitations I'm not allowed to have DHCP on all three 
NICs but only two out of three.

The machine boots fine via PXE, starts kernel, starts first jobs from the 
initrd and then starts to hand because it tries DHCP on the wrong device. As I 
have initially no idea about the order udev will assign the names (today it 
was eth0 and eth2 for the onbaord NICs) it's 

(a) very hard to just make the guess for ip=:::::eth2 or ip=eth2:dhcp (from 
the wiki) and
(b) very error prone as this seem to change over time, thus this is not 
deterministic at all.

Since I guess in most cases the PXE interfaces is the same where the FAI 
server mount should also be done on, is there a way to know in the initrd 
phase from which NIC the kernel and initrd were served (maybe just the MAC) 
and try that device first to mount the NFSROOT from?

Cheers

Carsten

PS: Thanks for this dreaded hostname bug fix :)