That is the the problem I am trying to convey -- the machines are coldstarted often and MAC addresses are reshufled on every first boot. If your cable to the management network is connected to left socket on the motherboard, that left socket needs to be eth0 on every coldstart. Sometimes it is not. "Yes" after the first boot when ifcfg files has been written it will be stable, but that mean someone has to go and either hand-edit ifcfg files or run ethtool -p eth0 and replug the cables.

> Subsequent cold starts only read the files

No they don't. Thare no files to read. You just wrote above in your commetn that the first time OS boots ifcfg are generated. So after a machine is coldstarted there are no ifcfg files! They are generated once per coldstart and saved. Then during each restart those files are read and everything is fine.

Now, I was saying, you can have a provisioning scheme where during coldstart, in your kickstart file you can fetch and write stable ifcfg files to prevent machines from creating their own. What we do instead is install a custom RPM with a udev script where an algorithm sorts the network interfaces in a stable way (since we only deal with a known and limited set of motherboards and network cards).