[CentOS] centso 5 modifying my ifcfg-eth[x] files

[Jerry Geis]

On Fri, 2007-04-20 at 10:21 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
>/ Ralph Angenendt wrote:
/>/ > Jerry Geis wrote:
/>/ >> Only thing to add here is the network card does work, however I
/>/ >> get a dmesg output that eth1 has an invalid MAC address.
/>/ > 
/>/ > Asus mainboard? 
/>/ > 
/>/ >> Is that invalid MAC address changing my setup? I dont think it should.
/>/ >> granted I'm still looking at finding a way to reset he MAC address or
/>/ >> something but I dont think the ifcfg-eth files should be modified.
/>/ > 
/>/ > The random address is different from the one which is in ifcfg-eth* from
/>/ > installation. 
/>/ > 
/>/ >> This seems like a bug- that is the reason for the post.
/>/ > 
/>/ > Yes. Googling around hints at this being a BIOS bug. Also see
/>/ > <http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1949>.
/>/ 
/>/ Can you fix this by removing the:
/>/ HWADDR=
/>/ line from the ifcfg-eth* files?  Most of my machines have swappable 
/>/ drive carriers and I routinely swap them and clone machines by dd'ing 
/>/ the raw disks.  If I remove the HWADDR entry I can assign the IP 
/>/ addresses when building the disks and have it come up correctly when the 
/>/ disk is installed in some remote machine.  I suppose someday this will 
/>/ break when I'm not looking, but it has saved me a lot of trouble over 
/>/ the last several years.  Now if the kernels would just be consistent 
/>/ about the order they probe the devices and assign the eth* names....
/

I actually tried setting the HWADDR= to another NIC's value, did not matter file still replaced with a DHCP type file.
I tried removing the HWADDR and file was still replaced with a DHCP type file.

Strange thing is I have 2 identical motherboards M2N-MX ASUS, two identical network cards. the other machine
appears to running fine... Its just this one machine that gives the bad MAC message in dmesg and 
will not keep its IP address.

Very odd,

Jerry