[CentOS] the wandering MAC?

Wed Oct 13 18:59:46 UTC 2010
Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com>

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Eero Volotinen <eero.volotinen at iki.fi> wrote:
> 2010/10/13 Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com>:
>> 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?
>
> Well, you can set  new mac address also manually on ifcfg-ethX script
> .. or ifconfig ..
>
> --
> Eero
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OK... how do I set it? Or, more importantly, how do I find out what
MAC the card currently thinks it has?

Boris.