Red hat reporting more NICs than are physically present

Question

We just deployed several servers (hp dl360p g8), and after the initial boot we're noticing that none of the network devices are showing up as cabled. Ethtool shows no link anywhere. Even more weird is that we are seeing 8 NICs; the server only has 4 physical nics. LSPCI also shows 8 nics.

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
03:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
03:00.2 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
03:00.3 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
04:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
04:00.2 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)
04:00.3 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe (rev 01)

Has anyone experienced this before? How can I fix it short of a new install?

Answer 1

Actually, I think you're 8 NICs short: the BCM5719 is a quad-port NIC, with 4 physical NICs I'd expect to see 16 ports here, but maybe I'm missing something.

Edit: so, I can't figure out how BCM5719 is really built. It could be that its quad-port is made of actually two dual-ports per NIC, which would then come to 4 NICs x 2 dual-ports = 8 PCI devices in your server. The documents on the BCM5719 site should specify that, I haven't made my way through all of them just yet though.

Answer 2

Ended up figuring it out, and it was kind of a dummy moment. Our standard intra-company server standard changed, and they now included a BCM5719 4 port nic in addition to the onboard 4-port nic. I disabled this in BIOS, swapped around the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* names and DEVICE=values, and deleted the lines in modprobe.conf. This returned everything back to the expected eth0-eth4, and also seemed to fix our networking problems. Thanks for the assist either way folks!