[CentOS] Re: Forcing ifcfg-eth0 to use the same nic in multi nic machine

Mon Aug 13 23:00:33 UTC 2007
Scott Silva <ssilva at sgvwater.com>

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.

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