Ezequiel Mastrasso

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linux rlm hostId – where is my eth0?

Most up to date linux flavors come with a device name management handler known as udev.
When the Linux kernel discovers a new devicein the system (for ie: a network interface card), it notifies udev daemon of the device event. The udev daemon will then match various device attributes against a set of rules to identify the device, name it, and store its information in udev database.

There are cases where something different than hardware change can trigger a different naming scheme for your devices, it can even name the devices differently every time you boot the system.
If this happens, all your license servers daemons will fail due to a different machine hostId ordering. I’ve seen this behavior on the latest Ubuntus, Centos 6.0, 6.2, 6.5, but seems to be ok in RHEL 7.

In case of network interfaces, it relies on MAC addresses to assign persistent names. You can find the MAC address based naming rules in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.

You can Read more about this here.

To fix this issue delete your /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and reboot. On the next boot, the file will be generated again and will hopefully give you a persistent naming.

If this still doesn’t work, you can add your own rules to /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to rename the network interfaces according to the MAC address, check this post on to do it.