I have an HP ProLiant DL360 G6 containing two onboard NICs as well as an HP NC375T (NetXen NX3031 chipset) 4-port PCIe card. The system was running with eth0 and eth1 belonging to the onboard NICs and eth2-eth5 on the NetXen card. I recently rebuilt the server and from the kickstart process onward, the NICs were reordered such that the onboard NICs became eth4 and eth5, while the NetXen card took over eth0-eth3.

I've had some experiences in the past where I tied NICs to specific interfaces via changes in the ifcfg-ethX config files, but this is the first time I've ever seen an add-in card take over eth0 from the motherboard's interfaces. This impacted my kickstart scripts, so:

1). How can I ensure that the onboard NICs take precedence in the kickstart arrangement.

2). What is the most consistent way to maintain that ordering through repeated reboots, kernel changes (e.g. going from a RHEL mainline kernel to a RHEL MRG realtime kernel), etc.

3). What is the interaction between the /etc/modprobe.conf module/NIC definitions, the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX and the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist functions in this context?