How to install network adapter in Linux (CentOS 5)

linux centos centos5 drivers

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The easiest way is to have the new card assume the same device name (eth0). Do this by:

Delete the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file. This is the file that ties hardware devices to ethX interfaces, causing your replacement card to become eth1 or eth2. Hopefully we can prevent that.
Shutdown the server ( shutdown -h now from a commandline should do the trick ).
Disable the onboard NIC in the BIOS, or remove the defective card.
Start the system up again. If the replacement card has assumed the same ethX device, it should start up with the same networking configuration. Check with ip addr or ifconfig -a.

These steps assume you have a fairly simple server which had one ethernet card, and needs to have it replaced with another single ethernet card.

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Jess Riedel over 1 year

My company has a CentOS 5 Linux server. The network card died today and we replaced it with an Intel Pro 1000 GT network adapter.

I'm not great with Linux. How can I get this new NIC working?

Thanks
- Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams about 13 years
  
  What are the PCI IDs of the card?
- Jess Riedel about 13 years
  
  @Ignacio - I don't know what that means. How do I find that?
- Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams about 13 years
  
  Run lspci -nn.
Jess Riedel about 13 years

The nics listed by ifconfig -a are eth1 and eth2. I'm pretty sure that eth2 is the new adapter. In /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, I don't see ifcfg-eth0, but I do see ifcfg-eth0.bak. Should I use that for the config?
Eduardo Ivanec about 13 years

It depends on whether the old adapter was eth0 or eth1. If it was eth0 go with ifcfg-eth0.bak, otherwise use ifcfg-eth1 if available. A "simple" if somewhat convoluted way to find out which NIC is which eth* is to take the MAC address listed by ifconfig and run it through a site like this. This only works if each NIC comes from a different vendor, though!
Soviero over 12 years

You could also open the "70-persistent-net.rules" in a text editor, and simply remove the line that corresponds to the old/dead NIC. Thus making it so that only the new card will get the old one's ID.