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Simon · Jun 29, 2009, 05:43 AM

I have a RedHat system here at work that has been giving me some network trouble. Whenever I boot the machine it refuses to turn on the eth1 network interface. However, once the box has finished booting, I can run a
/etc/init.d/network restart
and it will bring up the interface just fine. The problem with this is that I want to be able to run the box headless and remote so manually bringing up the interface is not really an option.

The box is running RHEL4. I have just installed the latest patches (made no difference). The network service is on. The 'Activate device when computer starts' for eth1 is checked. This computer has two Ethernet interfaces. One never worked (eth0) so I've switched it off and used eth1 instead. Interface eth1 works fine as soon as I bring it up manually. It's set to use DHCP.

Here's the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
HWADDR=00:22:15:61:58:4d
TYPE=Ethernet
DHCP_HOSTNAME=AccPhysSim
USERCTL=yes
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes
ONBOOT=yes
LINKDELAY=1000

Any ideas what's going wrong here?

Simon · Jun 30, 2009, 05:22 AM

*bump*

ghporter · Jun 30, 2009, 07:23 AM

The actual hardware you're using may have some bearing on what's going on with Redhat. Especially since you say that of the two Ethernet interfaces the box has, "one never worked." That sounds really "hardware failure" suspicious to me... An intermittent or otherwise flaky Ethernet card that requires an explicit hard restart from the OS would not surprise me.

Simon · Jun 30, 2009, 07:43 AM

Thanks for your reply, Glenn.

Thing is because of the code we're working on, we had to stick with RHEL4 rather than 5. But the hardware we bought was brand new. I've been told older versions of RH could have trouble with the onboard Ethernet controller. That's eth0 which I indeed had to disable.

The second Ethernet port (eth1) is connected through PCIe and has always worked fine. Apart from this stupid bug that it won't properly come up at boot time.

It's of course possible the two issues could both be solve by updating to RHEL5, but for several other reasons that's not really an option right now. One Ethernet interface is fine. I don't really care which one works. But in order to facilitate remote/headless operation, at least one interface needs to come up at boot time.

Simon · Jul 4, 2009, 05:12 AM

*bump*

Any more ideas?

Cold Warrior · Jul 4, 2009, 10:35 AM

add NM_CONTROLLED=no to the config and reboot.

Cold Warrior · Jul 9, 2009, 11:46 PM

did my suggestion help or did you fix it on your own?

Simon · Jul 10, 2009, 02:49 AM

CW, I didn't find time to tinker with it until the day before yesterday.

I saw the same advice on another page too. I wondered if it's applicable in this case though, since I have deactivated NM anyway.

Regardless, I've added it to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1. I however also installed the latest RHEL kernel updates which popped up while I was working with the box. Ever since it's been behaving just like it should after a reboot. Of course now I can't tell what fixed it, but all's good.

Thanks for your help.

OT: Next time somebody complains about Apple not mentioning what an update fixes (which is most often absolutely true) I'll remind them that Apple's in good company. RH seems the same in that respect. It's like they really don't want you to know what the kernel update should fix.

Cold Warrior · Jul 10, 2009, 06:10 PM

hah .... I do the same thing often when troubleshooting: throw a bunch on the wall, see what sticks. Then I don't know for sure what fixed it.

Simon · Jul 11, 2009, 03:52 AM

Hehe.

I should know better.

Oh well. At least things are now working.