SLES11 based LAG boot process gets delayed on initializing Network Interfaces reporting Waiting for mandatory devices

LAG reports Waiting for mandatory devices: eth-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx __NSC__
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
    eth-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx            No interface found

• Edit the "/etc/sysconfig/network/config" configuration file and configure "MANDATORY_DEVICES="
  
• Example: MANDATORY_DEVICES="eth0"
  

Network Interfaces available at a Linux Access Gateway will be configured using iManager (not Yast).On a SLES11 based LAG it will create for each available NIC a soft-linkusing the MAC address as identifier. This procedure is a leftover from the need to make sure network interfaces will be configured same way during a SLES9 boot process. Historically with SLES9 the order of initializing available NICs was not fix. Having more than one NIC in such a situation would not allow to make sure that interface names (eth0, eth1, eth[n]) would always be assigned to the same physical NIC. For more details on this you can review the man page for "ifup" section "Persistent_NAME" on SLES9. Using interface configuration names including the MAC address as unique identifier will make sure that NIC names will be persistent after each reboot. With the new kernel used on SLES11 the design has changed. As a leftover having the soft-link for each and every interface still storing the MAC address as identifier ( eth-id-xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx) will cause a delay.