Today I decided to change nic in my server because the onboard NIC wasn’t working properly. And so again I hit the problem that udev can assigns a NIC a different ethX name than what the kernel is printing in dmesg. So one modprobes the module and gets the following output:
e100: Intel(R) PRO/100 Network Driver, 3.5.17-k2-NAPI
e100: Copyright(c) 1999-2006 Intel Corporation
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:07.0[A] -> Link [LNKB] -> GSI 10 (level, low) -> IRQ 10
e100: eth1: e100_probe: addr 0xdcfff000, irq 10, MAC addr 00:A0:C9:E6:3E:75
Tries to start the NIC using /etc/init.d/net.eth1 start only to find that the device is not found! Luckily I had this problem before so I knew that I needed to clean up the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules. I seriously doubt that this “feature” of remembering the ethernet binding of old NICs brings more “joy” that headaches.