[Clfs-support] NIC interface by MAC address ??

[Michael A. Peters]

I'm looking through the ifup script and I don't see a way to ensure that 
a specific configuration is applied to a specific MAC address.

The issue I'm having is that I have two nics - one configured at boot 
and the other not - but it seems random which one is actually seen at 
eth0 and which is seen as eth1.

Is there a way (IE setting variable in ipv4 file) to make sure it brings 
up eth0 by hardware address? Because if so, I don't seem to be seeing it.

In RHEL you just set HWADDR in the nic config which is then used by the 
script /etc/sysconfig/network-functions

Browsing that script it looks like there is way via /sbin/ip to set the 
interface to a specific mac address before calling

ip link set ${NET_IF} up

but before I try and hack something myself in I want to know if I'm just 
missing something simple that's already there.

It's curious to me that sometimes at boot it wants eth0 to be onboard 
nvidia nic (which I have found to be problematic with my hub - but it 
works well if I bypass the hub and go straight to router interestingly) 
and sometimes it wants eth0 to be the tulip nic (which works well and is 
what the cat5 is plugged into)

Thanks for any suggestions