RHEL 6 - Network Gotcha

Earlier, I had reported problems with my Atheros integrated NIC on my new mainboard. I finished the build on my RHEL 6 cloud node by adding an Intel Pro100 I had lying around as eth1. As expected, Anaconda recognized the card on install. To my surprise, the card was not active on first boot. But then the real surprise... I concurrently installed a RHEL 6 VM, and its virtual 8139 was also not energized on boot.

Something wicked is afoot, and it smells putridously similar to:

NetworkManager

When we cat ifcfg-eth0, by default, the file includes DEVICE, HWADDR, ONBOOT equal "no" (the symptom), and NM_CONTROLLED equal "yes" (the disease). I've hated NetworkManger ever since it showed up on RHEL 5. (It uses that ridiculous mixed cap, no space, spelling because the Red Hat developer who "innovated" this solution wishes he worked at Apple instead, and that's the way Apple processes are named.) My traditional solution was to chkconfig NetworkManger off, hardcode the network params, and life was good.

There is a perplexing part to this story, however, that forces more review. On RHEL 6, if you select @Base, @Minimal, or @Server-Platform, NetworkManager is not installed. That's fine with me, but the cards are tagged as being controlled by a service that doesn't exist. So, I approached this from the point of view that just as we are going to have to learn to use postfix instead of sendmail, know how to configure static networking with NetworkManager. Preferably, without the GUI.

So, I installed a slew of RPMs from DVD to get the NetworkManager service running. I read man pages, researched in the web, played with the tools, and found the solution. The solution is to hard code the static IP in a script under /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d. But wait a second... If we have to hard code the data in a script, why not put it in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts as we have been for over ten years. Good idea: Let's uninstall all this piece of crap.

The workarounds:
* Kickstart the server with a static address
* Set the address using firstboot
* Manually edit the interface files
* Use system-config-network-tui to set the address. (Don't try to use the TUI to set it to DHCP, it won't work)