Current status of multi-homes machines

[Michael Tautschnig]

Hi Carsten,

> 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 
> 
[...]

I think the best way is to ensure this arbitrary renaming does not happen (as it
will interfer with things like iptables later on anyway). To do so, you'll need
to come up with a /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file that has the
necessary entries. Basically you can copy this off of the running system and
keep it as part of your configs. AFAIK, this file will also end up in the
initrd, which has the following consequences:

- To ensure this file is used, the initrd must be updated after copying it
  (e.g., using update-initramfs).
- To use this config in the PXE boot, you need to use an initrd that has a
  matching entry in its 70-persistent-net.rules for PXE boot. It should be
  sufficient to extract the currently used initrd, add the file, and repack it.

Hope this helps,
Michael

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