Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 198142
eth1 got renamed to "dev1804289383" on boot
Last modified: 2014-03-16 23:00:32 EDT
Description of problem: When I booted this morning, I had no eth1 (wireless) device; instead, I had a weird device called "dev1804289383". /sbin/iwconfig showed this device instead of eth1, and when I started system-config-network, it showed "eth1" as inactive even though I was on the network. Unfortunately, this was early in the morning, and I didn't have time to check things out too thoroughly, and when I booted again later in the morning "eth1" was back again. I still have the /var/log/messages file showing this weird device, which as far as I can tell behaved exactly like the normal eth1 wrt. DHCP and so on. I'm assigning this to initscripts because I've never seen this before, and initscripts is the only thing that got updated on my system yesterday. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): initscripts-8.31.5-1 How reproducible: Not so far; when I rebooted after seeing these symptoms, it came back to normal. Sorry!
initscripts-8.31.5-1 was just released over the weekend to address this and similar issues, meaning you just upgraded and I'm guessing you won't be able to reproduce the problem. Closing bug for now on that basis, but if you can reproduce again, request it to be reopened.
Okay, unless it happens again I'm fine with the bug being closed. However, I'm pretty sure this happened *after* I had already updated to the new initscripts; according to my logs, the initscripts update happened on Saturday morning, I booted once more after the update on Saturday and twice on Sunday (it's a laptop), and this weirdness happened on my first boot on Monday morning.
I had a suspicion that might be the case after re-reading your original post. I've seen similar NIC naming oddities in the past when changing out one NIC for another, but they all seemed to go away once ifcfg-ethX files were appropriately updated, so you might double-check that you have HWADDR set in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX (as well as the correct 'alias ethX driver' lines in /etc/modprobe.conf). In any case, definitely let us know if you see the problem again.
If you do see it again, please attach /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth*.
Closing for the moment ; please reopen if it reoccurs.