Despite moving most of my place-of-work’s computing into the cloud, I still rent an ancient computer for less than $1/day to host several of my projects, including this blog.

It’s been pretty stable, but since I have been gently pushing the hardware, the network card has been failing and starting to hang until the driver forces a hard reset.

The NOC techician I spoke with offered to move it to the secondary NIC (network port), and I agreed. He was kind enough to probe that I had an open (unbridged) IP available, so I set the physical NIC to that address, while leaving the virtual bridged NICs alone other than adding the new interface as part of the bond. As the bridged interface was the default gateway, I didn’t have to do anything else.

#ifconfig eth1 x.x.x.x netmask y.y.y.y up
#brctl addif br0 eth1

30 seconds later, it cut across seamlessly when he physically moved the cable. Didn’t even get an alert, it was that fast.

Removed the old NIC from the bridge (just in case), took down my spare IP from the physical NIC, and we’re back and rocking.

#brctl delif br0 eth0
#ifconfig eth1 del x.x.x.x

Had I not kept myself used to managing physical hardware, this would have taken longer.