On Sun, 2004-08-22 at 23:01 -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > Not fine to a lot of servers, though. Sometimes you have
multiple nics
> > in a machine and you don't want certain ones even coming up if you can
> > avoid it. Maybe they're a heartbeat backup nic
>
> Loading the driver doesn't mean assigning an address to it. I don't see
> how simply having the driver loaded would cause problems for a backup
> NIC.
loading the driver means activating the device, which typically means
the network (especially switches) are suddenly aware of it.
Ok. But certainly heartbeat is a special case - you have to do some
manual configuration, and whatever program we have to load drivers could
certainly provide a blacklist.
bug or not, loading a driver just b/c a device is present is a good
way
to make A LOT of systems unbootable.
I've never had problems personally when I ran Debian, they use discover,
which IIRC autoloads modules for anything it knows about.
I'll point you to thousands of
video cards as an example.
The kernel already has blacklists for bad devices, sounds like that
needs to grow...