Using Eth1 as main ethernet card

[gator94]

I'd like to switch my Amahi to my gigabith card in my amahi and have no clue on how to do this.

My Amahi server was configured with the motherboard native eth0 which is working fine, however, this is a 100 Nic card. I purchased a HIRO (Realtek 8169) Gigabit pci nic card which I have installed. The system seems to recognize it fine, but when I switch the rj-45 cable to the Gigabit and restart the system, the server does not boot. Only when I switch the rj-45 to the native 100 card port, the system then boots ok, with both ethernet cards active.

I have the 100 card with static ip address 10.xx.xx.10, the gigabit card has static 10.xx.xx.30, both seem to be active The ifconfig instruction returns the following:

[root@server1 ~]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:XX:B9:YY:B1:YY ( I have deleted these numbers for security purposes)
inet addr:10.xx.xx.10 Bcast:10.xx.xx.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::yyy:xxxx:fe8b:xxxx/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:27601 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:35485 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:4610317 (4.3 MiB) TX bytes:31084749 (29.6 MiB)
Interrupt:20

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:zz:zz:B3:zz
inet addr:10.xx.xx.30 Bcast:10.xx.xx.254 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::xxx:yyyy:fe16:zzzz/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:1053 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:30 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:79661 (77.7 KiB) TX bytes:2802 (2.7 KiB)
Interrupt:16

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
RX packets:28081 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:28081 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:29807629 (28.4 MiB) TX bytes:29807629 (28.4 MiB)

tun0 Link encap:UNSPEC HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00
inet addr:10.8.0.1 P-t-P:10.8.0.2 Mask:255.255.255.255
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)


so my questions are these:

1) how can i setup my gigabit card currently (eth1) to be the main card the system uses? or at least use it as the port where all trafic comes through as it is a much faster card than the native ethernet board.
2) is there anything I can do so the system does not freeze at boot when the rj-45 is connected to the gigabit card port?

I have been able to get this info through webmin in the hda.

[moredruid]

Well you can do the ethernet card switch 2 ways:
edit /usr/bin/hdactl and change
my $device = "eth0";
to eth1
stop hdactl, monit will restart it automagically.

OR:

go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts and switch ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 around
Just make sure you also edit the line
DEVICE=
to the proper value as well.

as to why the server won't boot with a cable attached to your Gb NIC: weird, I'd almost say it's a hardware issue.
I would test it in a different machine (possibly with a different OS as well) to see if it works fine there to make completely sure it's not an OS/driver issue.

[gator94]

Thanks moredruid,

would any of these methods also take care of the dependencies? I have eth1 with static ip 10.xx.xx.30, which is different than the Amahi orginal setup of 10.xx.xx.10 which eth0 is using as its IP address? also when you refert to switching the scripts around do you mean saving the current ifcfg-eth0 as ifcfg-eth1 and viceversa? Thanks for your help.

[gator94]

well I am getting close... my server did not freeze with the rj-45 connected to the eth1. I made the change to the hdactl file, but I loss the connection to the hda, meaning, i wasn't able to connect to the server after switching to eth1. I am going to do:

1) keep the hdactl file with eth0
2) I am going to change the configuration of eth1 to get the same static ip of eth1, off course change eth0 to something else
3) change the ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 as you described in this thread.

Let me see how that works out...

[gator94]

Ok, here’s the final report on this.
I ended up changing the ifcfg-eth0 and eth1 as you suggested. I have been connecting to the server headless through FreeNX. After making these changes, I ended up having to go to the Fedora console ( yeap get the old monitor and keyboard out). In there I found out that because of my changes to the ifcfg-ethX files that fedora had deactivated both NIC cards as they conflicted.

I made the changes in Fedora through Administration, Networking, and selected the appropriate NIC card, activated the card and boila!, gigabit NIC card is now working.

Thanks Moredruid!...let's see if my local speed improves now as my local network is now all Gbit.

[moredruid]

ah yes, I forgot about the IP change

glad you got it working in the end

[coolstone]

Hey moredruid,

I am trying to do this too. But I didn't succeed when following this post. When I reboot to the system, and reactivate the nic card, it says,

"Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring." So I can't activate the Gigabit card.

Could you tell me the details?

Thanks!

Simon

[wobbly]

try this worked for me
http://forums.amahi.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3335

[coolstone]

Thanks so much for your help! wobbly!

I followed your direction, also updated /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, and deleted ifcfg-eth1 file.

It works!!! I copied a 3gb file, transfer rate is around 50MB/sec. Is it normal?

Now I can see eth1 still in the Network Configuration, but not affect the speed. How can I remove it?

Thanks again!