Johnny Hughes spake the following on 8/13/2007 1:21 PM:
Doug Coats wrote:
As far as I understand networking, if you only have 1 MAC, you only have 1 NIC. You might have 2 connectors, but that seems really strange. It seems like this is some sort of undefined behavior. I think that having only 1 MAC really *IS* an issue.
I have used these boards(I have 6 of the same motherboard) for about 3 years now with no problems, until I upgraded the OS this summer from Fedora Core 4 to CentOS 5. With every windows install and Linux install on these mother boards they report two separate nics that can both be configured and active at the same time with the same MAC address.
Doug
How can 2 nics from different companies have the same mac address ....
I don't think that is possible.
each card needs a separate MAC address, at least the way I understand networking.
Most of these boards that I have seen having this problem are using the Marvell gigabit ethernet chipset. It probably either has buggy firmware, or the bios code that these boards use is initializing the net chips wrong. I'm sure that Marvell also provided this code.