[CentOS] the wandering MAC?

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Oct 13 20:11:36 UTC 2010


On 10/13/2010 1:55 PM, Eero Volotinen 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.

>>
>> 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?
>
> Well, you can set  new mac address also manually on ifcfg-ethX script
> .. or ifconfig ..

But the ifcfg-ethX scripts don't run if the HWADDR entry doesn't match 
the NIC MAC.  How do you get the right name connected to the right nic 
so you can even run ifconfig sensibly?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com



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