I have a Dell PowerEdge R610 system sitting in a co-location facility. It has four onboard NICs and a 2-port PCIe NIC in one of the slots. I'm usually working with HP servers, so I have the ability to enable/disable PCI devices in the BIOS to control device appearance during installations. Sometimes, I work around NIC enumeration issues this way (e.g. motherboard port 1 was actually eth2 for my CentOS installer). But in this case, I want to keep the card in the server, but just not available to the OS for testing purposes. The HP ProLiant BIOS lets you disable specific devices. Does the Dell R610 offer this? I was only able to see IRQ assignment options in the R610 BIOS.
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I could not find a way to do this within the Dell R710 or R610 BIOS. It just may not be a feature available to the Dell systems.

ewwhite
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From linux I can give you two options:
1) May be ifup and ifdown can do the job.
2) Also you can put ONBOOT=no on the ifcfg-ethX you want.
Also, I remember that dell has the openmanage and may be, and just may be, is there an option for that on it.

Marc Riera
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The concern is that I'd like to have the device disabled at the time of installation. – ewwhite Aug 26 '11 at 12:10