Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 432 — #458

Hotplug network cards are not assigned a static interface name, so the con-

ﬁguration for one of those cards cannot be stored under the name of the

interface. Instead, a name is used that contains the kind of hardware and

the connection point. In the following, this name is referred to as the hard-

ware description. ifup must be started with two arguments — the hard-

ware description and the current interface name. ifup then determines the

conﬁguration that best ﬁts the hardware description.

Note

Hotpluggable Network Cards on IBM S/390 and zSeries

As a general rule, network cards on IBM S/390 and zSeries are

hotpluggable. Unlike PCMCIA cards on PCs, the automatic

conﬁguration via DHCP is not possible on these platforms. The

cards are detected but must be conﬁgured manually. The fol-

lowing example deals exclusively with hardware with PCMCIA

support.

Note

For example, consider a laptop with two PCMCIA slots, a PCMCIA eth-

ernet network card, and an internal network card conﬁgured as eth0. If

the internal card is in slot 0, its hardware description is eth-pcmcia-0.

The cardmgr or the hotplug network script runs the command

ifup eth-pcmcia-0 eth1. ifup searches /etc/sysconfig/

network/ for the ﬁle ifcfg-eth-pcmcia-0. If this ﬁle does not exist,

it consecutively searches for ifcfg-eth-pcmcia, ifcfg-pcmcia-0,

ifcfg-pcmcia, ifcfg-eth1, and ifcfg-eth. The ﬁrst of these ﬁles

found by ifup is used for the conﬁguration. To generate a network conﬁg-

uration valid for all PCMCIA network cards in all slots, the conﬁguration

ﬁle must be named ifcfg-pcmcia. This ﬁle would be used for the ether-

net card in slot 0 (eth-pcmcia-0) as well as for a token ring card in slot 1

(tr-pcmcia-1).

YaST numbers the conﬁgurations for hotplug cards and writes the corre-

sponding settings to ifcfg-eth-pcmcia-<number>. To use such a con-

ﬁguration ﬁle for all slots, ifcfg-eth-pcmcia is linked to this ﬁle. Keep

this in mind if you conﬁgure the network sometimes with and sometimes

without YaST.

432 21.3. Manual Network Conﬁguration