Manually configuring a NIC
After adding a network card (NIC or Network Interface Card) to an OpenSuSE system, and configuring the device with YaST, I could not get it to activate. After a reboot it still didn’t show up as an active interface.
YaST did create an interface for it, along with all the configuration information (to include the static IP Address), but bringing up the interface (using ifup eth0) failed. (NOTE: If this is a second NIC, it would show up as eth1, a third NIC as eth2, etc.) The configuration information showed up in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-bus-pci-0000:02:03.0. When I execute the command ifup eth0 it give me an error "No configuration found for eth0".
The simple solution is to rename the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth-bus-pci-0000:02:03.0 to /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0. Then you can run the command ifup eth0 and it will work fine.
Note that the names of the device (bus-pci-0000:02:03.0) may be different on your system. If it is, just use YaST to determine which NIC it is (based upon the device assignment) and rename that device.
An alternative is to rename the device based upon it’s MAC address. So if the MAC address is 00:0C:29:31:0F:48 you could rename the deivce from ifcfg-eth-bus-pci-0000:02:03.0 to ifcfg-eth-id-00:0C:29:31:0F:48. Of course, this is in directory /etc/sysconfig/network/.
Additional information about configuring and debugging NICs under SuSE / SLES can be found at these web pages:
http://openskills.info/infobox.php?ID=949
You can also search Novell OpenSuSE website for additional information .