On 14-Oct-06 Dan Hatton wrote:
On Fri, 13 Oct 2006, cl@isbd.net wrote:
If a system has more than one NIC then what happens by default regarding connecting to thre resto f the local network.
Does it simply choose the first NIC that 'appears' during boot to be the one that is used for 'itself'?
This almost certainly varies from distro to distro. On FC4, the default route is, by default, the last interface to be brought up. The order in which the interfaces are brought up is determined by a line in /etc/init.d/network that says
LANG=C sort -k 1,1 -k 2n | \
which (I think) sorts them into alphabetical order of the interface type (e.g. eth, ppp, usb) then into numerical order of their number (e.g. eth0, eth1, ppp0, ppp1, usb0, usb1.)
What I've never sussed out (on the one machine where I have two physical Ethernet cards) is how the OS (SuSE 7.2 in this case) decides which one is going to be eth0 and which eth1.
In my case, there was initially only one, so that was eth0 anyway. Then I installed the second one, and this is a different model from the first (first is 3Com 3c509, second a 3c590), so this may be the hook. But what would happen if (say) they were both 3x590? It may be that it depends on the order in which they are detected on bootup which would have to do with their PCI identities, but there I'm only guessing!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
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