Spare ethernet card prevents thin client from booting

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Tue, 08 Jul 2008, Greg Reagle wrote:

> I have experienced an Edubuntu server (version 6.06 I think) with two
> Ethernet devices that is not consistent about which one it calls eth0
> and which one it calls eth1.  

I can't recall if it was in 6.06, but there was definitely a tweak in (I
think udev) on v7.04 which set /etc/iftab as a table of devicenames and mac
addresses in order that they would remain consistent.  That may have been
to address this.

The issue was fixed more thoroughly in 7.10 as I understand it.

> I don't know whether this inconsistency is at the BIOS level or the
> kernel level.

Nor do I.  When you're talking about thin clients though, the trouble can
be that the behaviour is entirely consistent, but consistently setting the
PXE card to eth1, while the ltsp boot scripts presume that eth0 is the
active network connection.  A single network card is preferable for this
reason.  You could alternatively plug _both_ network cards into the switch
that the server's on.  This should mean the PXE will happen on one
interface and the remainder of the boot will use the other.

If someone can patch LTSP to check through each network interface looking
for a link, that might be the best way to sort this out.

Gavin