Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 120532
last auto-activated interface steals default network gateway bit
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:44:04 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 Description of problem: This may be more of an anaconda issue than initscripts, but I'm not sure. Installed RHEL 3 QU3 on a 16-way x445 box, which has 4 Broadcom LAN ports (2 per cabinet). Set two of them active in the installation, eth0 to the 9.47. local subnet, and eth2 to 10.0.1.1 as a network test link. Turns out that the default gateway bit was set on the eth2 interface (to 10.0.1.254 -- which was not a router), despite having configured the default gateway on eth0 to 9.47. This is easy enough to fix, but would be confusing to the unwary Is there some way to make anaconda and/or the network initscripts deal with multiple interfaces better? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-7.31.10.EL-1 How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RHEL 3.0/QU03 on 16-way x445 2. Enable multiple interfaces during set-up. 3. Fail miserably, unless the last active interface is supposed to be the default gateway. Actual Results: All packets were sent to the twilight zone (10.0.1.254), instead of the 9.47 subnet. This made the system appear to have dead networking, despite having both eth0 and eth2 enabled, both as far as neat and ifconfig were concerned. Expected Results: eth0 should have been the default gateway. Additional info:
AFAIK, this is expected behavior... unless you tweak the config, the last machine gets the default route. There are various ways you can change the config for this, of course.
Really? OK, how about a nice bright red message when someone configures extra interfaces? Maybe: "The last interface will be the default gateway." Or whatever. Just pointing out something that might perplex the unwary, now that more servers come with dual or quad LAN chips.