Here's my problem: I have a bunch of identical 1U servers (SunFireX2100 M2s) with four onboard Ethernet ports, driven by two differentchipsets (two nVidia ones, two Broadcom ones). I want to configure ourRHEL installs so that no matter which physical unit I stuff the systemdisks into, the Ethernet ports come up with consistent names that matchthe ports on the back of the server; eth0 should always be the portlabeled 'port 0' and

Suppose that you have a software RAID array. Suppose further that youhave a disk or two fail spectacularly; they don't just have errors, theygo offline completely.

Naturally, software RAID fails the disks out; you wind up with somethingin /proc/mdstat that looks like this:

md10 : active raid6 sdbd1[12] sdbc1[11] sdbb1[10] sdba1[9]sdaz1[13](F) sday1[

Here is a thought that just crystallized for me:

In operations, crud rains down out of the sky and the sysadmins haveto make it go and keep it going.

In system administration, at least you get to design and build thecrud yourself.

(Corollaries about things you inherit from a previous sysadmin whenyou move into an existing environment are left as an exercise for thereader.)