[CentOS] the wandering MAC?

[Boris Epstein]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Brunner, Brian T.
<BBrunner at gai-tronics.com> wrote:
>
>> I just tried a full powerdown with NTP deactivated. The
>> system came up, the time is fine.
>>
>> Not that the time on the motherboard should necessarily
>> affect the MAC on an expansion card, but that was a good test
>> nonetheless.
>
> I'm suspicious (as others have suggested) the card itself is bad.  I
> think to suspect the flash chip that stores the MAC addr.  The rest of
> the card may be perfect.  Using it long-term might require no more than
> a manual edit of the init script for it adding something to this effect
> 'if MAC == zeros; then set MAC to 00:0a:cd:1a:c1:71 fi'.  This will fix
> this card without clobbering it's successor down the road.
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Brian,

While those suspicions were well justified I am not sure your guess is
correct in this particular case as I just swapped the NIC I had for a
different one and I seem to be getting the same sort of errors again.
What's the likelihood that two NICs in a row have a faulty flash?