> 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.
That can be real bad in heartbeat configurations when you want to load
it as different hw address on failure.
> or maybe they're an
> onboard nic that plays hell with your bios.
That just sounds like a bug.
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'll point you to thousands of
video cards as an example.
-sv