Items of pain that I put here so others hopefully don't have to go through the pain:

(I'm not formatting/editing this particularly well because I'm more concerned about getting it in search engines, and communicating the information)

• Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.1 introduces persistant network device names. This seems cool, but breaks many scripts (including cobbler for installing). This happens because the network names eth0, eth1, ethX have become standard. Names like em1, and p1p2 look like insanity (why not just add a tool that lets you find out where a network port is given a device, rather than rename the device?) To turn it off pass the kernel the parameter "biosdevname=0" (See this document for details)