On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 12:04:46PM -0700, Scott Silva said:
Jerry Geis spake the following on 4/26/2007 11:53 AM:
have had same problems with my asus m2npv-vm board (onboard forcedepth nic) the first days with the board under fedora 6 - would say no big diff's to centos-
I tried loading centos 4 but it does not even recognize the forcedeth device at all. even manually loading.
I'm at a loss. I have a script file that runs and sets things up the way I want after boot up. Not pretty - but I guess it works.
Jerry
This appears to be a bug in the forcedeth driver and the chipset. The driver seems to pull the current MAC address from a register, and writes it back differently. The systems with the trouble must allow this write to take place, and it changes the MAC address for the next boot. I think if you add a HWADDR: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx command to the ifcfg script, it might stick. You will have to find your real MAC address on your own, but it might be on a sticker somewhere on the board, or in a service tag on the equipment.
I would go farther and suggest just installing a real Intel ethernet card and be done with it if at all possible.
I also have an asus board with the nvidia / realtek / forthdeth driver chip and have had nothing but problems no matter what distro I run.
It's not worth messing with a device that the manufacturer supports so poorly. I'm going to make sure that any motherboard I buy in the future does NOT have that crappy ethernet chipset in it.