Re: [Hampshire] Some strange brokenness...

>> In a rather ill-executed manoeuvre yesterday, I finally upgraded my
>> RHEL3-type box. And I've borked it :-(
>
> What did you upgrade it to?

It's essentially RHEL4 now. A bit olong in the tooth, but it's a disty I
know well. And it was to hand when I needed it :-)

>> If I modprobe -r the driver, then modprobe it back in again, the
>> interface
>> comes up with the correct name, and things then get back to normal.
>
> Sounds a bit fishy...

I've found out a bit more this morning. It appears that the forcedeth
driver is attempting - and failing - to claim the Realtek interface. I've
not yet worked out why. But this would explain why reloading r8169 works.

> Nope, although you have already stumbled across at least one workaround,
> which you can of course script.

That's a bodge, not a fix. I might move this box up to WBEL5 if I can't
sort the problem, but I want to understand it really.

> Have a peek at the contents of your
> /etc/modprobe.conf (or /etc/modules, cannot exactly remember the correct
> one for RHEL), and look for the "alias ethX modulename" line (X being the
> proper eth device number) for some strange module parameters.

It's modprobe.conf, and all seems normal - each ethX is aliased to the
correct module name, and the only options are the ones I added to try to
debug it.

> * Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX and change "Onboot" to
> "No"
> * Add something like this at the bottom of the /etc/rc.local file:
> /sbin/modprobe modulename
> sleep 5
> ifconfig ethX up
>
> A bit ugly, but you should be good to go.

That's beyond ugly; it's probably unmaintainable. I also have to restart a
whole bunch of daemons that fail to initialise properly (eth1 is my link
to the outside world, so DNS is dependent on it, ...). This is the fifth
OS I've had on this particular machine[1], so maintainability is quite
important to me.

Vic.

[1] Strictly speaking, none of the original hardware is still there - but
it's the same system with lots of upgrades :-)