[KLUG Members] IP Aliases on Redhat 7.3 broken? - FYI

[Bruce Smith]

While upgrading a server to Redhat 7.3 recently, I noticed that IP
Aliases no longer worked.  (they worked in previous versions of Redhat)

I had these configuration files:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:0
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:1
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:2

Each file contains two lines, a "IPADDR=" and a "NETMASK=".

Since this was an upgrade from Redhat 7.2 (not a fresh install), I
thought maybe the format of that file changed, so I ran "linuxconf" to
recreate the aliases, and they still didn't show up after a reboot or a
"service network restart".

After reading/running/tracing/debugging a lot of Redhat startup scripts,
I found a "fix" (workaround?) for this bug.  (I think it's a bug now)

In each file, I had to add one single line:  "DEVICE="  with the name of
the alias device.  i.e.:

DEVICE="eth0:0"

and everything now works as expected.

This is something the script should be able to derive from the filename,
and I suspect previous versions did this correctly.  I'll let Redhat
make that fix.  In the mean time, I'll use my quick fix of adding the
"DEVICE=" line in each file.

Just a FYI, in case anyone else runs into the same problem . . .

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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