Windows 2012 labels network cards opposite of what the board manual and Xen Server say.

June 18, 2015

I decided to finally start setting up the test vm on my vm server. As I was doing this I noticed that windows labels the network cards the opposite of what the manual shows. Normally it won't matter but when you're trying to set up static ips it's good to know what's what. So I labeled the back to match the board manual. I checked the ip I set up on the nic and it sure shows eth0 which is correctly labeled as the first nic on the manual. So go figure. Needless to say this tiny difference can make a huge impact, but this is why I like to test things on my own first. So I'll leave it alone and go with what the other two state. There's no need to get crazy about it, but it's a good thing to know.

 Here in the USA we read from left to right. In China, it's from right to left if I remember correctly. So with that in mind you can see the two letters on the top of the nics in the manual. F is left and H is right.

 Now if you look at this page, you see f as being LAN2 and h as being Lan 1.

 The Xen server shows I'm connected to eth0 which is the Intel nic. The pictures are angled due to my lamp glare.

 Now you can see that eth1 is now the realtek nic on the same server.

Now I get to windows and this is what I see. It says I'm connected to the realtek nic 2 and not the first which is the intel and what the Xen and board manufacturer says it is. So you see, no, I'm not making this up. You should know that despite this everything works, but it could give you a nice headache though.

So either Xen and the manufacturer of the board has this wrong or Microsoft has it backwards. Keep in mind that this is the 2012 trial version of the server I'm testing. So let's see what happens.