[TriLUG] how to determine device name for ifcfg-ethx file

[Tom Bryan]

On Thursday 18 November 2004 11:09 pm, Wesley Zhang wrote:

> How does redhat 9 determine the device variable for its ifcfg-eth
> files?  I used minimum redhat 9 installation on my compaq desktop with
> two physical interfaces. After a sucessful boot up, ifconfig -a only
> shows lo interface. I copied ifconfig-lo to ifconfig-eth0 and if I
> specified device=eth0 and ifup eth0 silently does nothing. My question
> is how to figure out what to use for device in ifcfg-eth files? How can
> I query linux to get the NICs info before it is configured?

Good question.  I'm not sure.  

If you run 
dmesg | grep eth
as root, does it show anything?  You can also simply scan the output of dmesg 
for your network card.  If you're not seeing it there, then I suppose that 
it's possible that the OS just isn't seeing the NIC at all.

---Tom