{"id":47,"date":"2008-07-18T00:51:12","date_gmt":"2008-07-17T16:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/?p=47"},"modified":"2008-08-29T09:54:38","modified_gmt":"2008-08-29T01:54:38","slug":"ethernet-card-problem-eth2_rena","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/2008\/07\/18\/ethernet-card-problem-eth2_rena\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethernet card problem – ‘eth2_rena’"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the sort of problem<\/strong> I expect that only happens to people who muck about<\/strong> with already working kit. Another evening spent regretting ever shutting down a running system ‘for just a few minutes<\/strong> while I add some hardware’.<\/p>\n

\"Dell<\/a>I run a few websites on a Dell PowerEdge SC440 tower server<\/strong>. I must write in detail about it sometime: I love it – it’s dirt cheap, fast enough for almost anything I want to use it for, very quiet and when I put it on a power meter, I get a reading of 53W<\/strong>. It replaced a noisy, hot, bag of nails that would hardly run for a month without something going wrong. That previous POS<\/strong> was consuming<\/strong> 186W<\/strong> on the power meter, so the SC440 will probably pay for itself in a couple of years. We set up the SC440, switched it on, and then forgot<\/strong> it existed for 8 months<\/strong> – and it’s right here, between all our desks.<\/p>\n

A new application I’m working on reminded me the SC440 existed – a rapidly growing<\/strong> database (adding Gigabytes a day), and several data-mining applications<\/strong> running concurrently<\/strong> on the same data. A few rough calcs tell me the cheapest way to cope with the extra load for a few months (until I know whether the project is worth<\/strong> investing<\/strong> heavily in) is to buy a couple more SC440s and connect them to the first via Gigabit<\/strong> ethernet<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I have terrible taste<\/strong> in network<\/strong> equipment<\/strong>, as I’ve mentioned before<\/a>, so I decided to connect the two new SC440s direct<\/strong> to the original one with extra<\/strong> ethernet cards<\/strong>. So, I posted a ‘down for maintenance for a few minutes’ page on another server, mapped<\/strong> the HTTP<\/strong> port<\/strong> to that server, switched off the SC440 for the first time in 8 months, popped it open, admired<\/strong> the forethought<\/strong> that’s gone into adding cards, inserted the two ethernet cards, closed it all up, switched it on.<\/p>\n

Disaster<\/strong>! Elation at seeing eth0<\/strong>, eth1<\/strong> and eth2<\/strong> in the startup<\/strong> messages soon turns to panic<\/strong> when the link lights won’t light on inserting the cable from the router. One of the sockets has lights, so that one gets hastily<\/strong> configured<\/strong> as the port incoming HTTP traffic is usually routed to, just to get the websites back online<\/strong>. A quick look at the output from ifconfig<\/strong> tells me that eth0, eth1 and eth2 are now eth2, eth1 and eth2_rena<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Broadcom\"<\/a>I searched for help on ‘eth2_rena’, and found the very handy ‘ip link<\/strong>‘ command – ifconfig was truncating<\/strong> the device name to 9 characters and the name of the device was ‘eth2_rename<\/strong>‘. I imagine the ports are enumerated<\/strong> first by the driver module<\/strong> as it loads – my cards (and the embedded<\/strong> adapter<\/strong>) are all Broadcom<\/strong> NetXtreme<\/strong> Gigabit Ethernet, so rely on the tg3<\/strong> kernel<\/strong> module. Later in the boot sequence, udev<\/strong> works its magic on the adapters and renames<\/strong> them according to rules in (on my setup)<\/p>\n

\/etc\/udev\/rules.d\/75-network-devices.rules<\/code><\/p>\n

If I wasn’t still reeling<\/strong> from the unexpected problem, I’d have a go at removing<\/strong> the network card naming rules altogether (though leaving the file in place – there’s a comment that says it’ll be regenerated<\/strong> if the file is deleted<\/strong>). Since all my cards are the same<\/strong>, I could just put up with the order the module picks when it loads. For some reason, the naming rules attempted<\/strong> to rename some of the cards, based on MAC address<\/strong>, but I’m guessing<\/strong> the ‘eth2_rename’ is the result of naming eth0 to eth2 when the name eth2 is assigned<\/strong> to another card. My hastily concocted solution<\/strong> was to give them all new names:
\n
\nKERNEL==\"eth?\", ATTR{address}==\"00:1d:09:ff:ff:ff\", NAME=\"eth_bc0\"
\nKERNEL==\"eth?\", ATTR{address}==\"00:10:18:ff:ff:fe\", NAME=\"eth_bc1\"
\nKERNEL==\"eth?\", ATTR{address}==\"00:10:18:ff:ff:fd\", NAME=\"eth_bc2\"<\/code><\/p>\n

I had to edit \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.inet1.conf<\/strong> to update the network card names there, and \/etc\/rc.d\/rc.inet1<\/strong> for a regular expression<\/strong> for setting up the cards, but once this was done, it all worked like a charm<\/strong>. My preconceived<\/strong> (and ultimately silly<\/strong>, I realise) notion that my cards should be numbered 0, 1, 2 from the top is satisfied<\/strong> too!<\/p>\n

I hope that’s useful<\/strong> to someone, if only to increase the number of results you get from a search when your ‘only take a second<\/strong>‘ job suddenly becomes indefinite<\/strong>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the sort of problem I expect that only happens to people who muck about with already working kit. Another evening spent regretting ever shutting down a running system ‘for just a few minutes while I add some hardware’. I run a few websites on a Dell PowerEdge SC440 tower server. I must write […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,20,31],"tags":[110,34,18,22],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-broken","category-fixed","category-hardware","tag-hardware","tag-network","tag-server","tag-slackware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}