[CentOS] the wandering MAC?

Wed Oct 13 19:27:37 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Eero Volotinen wrote:
> 2010/10/13 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:
<snip>
>>>>> 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
<snip>
>>>> 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?

I'd start worrying about the m/b slot. Have you tried a different one, if
one's available?
>>>
>>> Well, you can set  new mac address also manually on ifcfg-ethX script
>>> .. or ifconfig ..
>>
>> OK... how do I set it? Or, more importantly, how do I find out what
>> MAC the card currently thinks it has?
>
> Well, ifconfig?
>
> It really doesn't matter, just generate random one..
>
> edit  /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX
>
> Remove HWADDR=00:00:00:00:00:00
> add MACADDR=WH:AT:YO:UW:AN:T0
>
> It should work this way and then just service network restart ..

I think I'd leave the first three octets alone - that's just the
manufacturer's code. Oh, and I doubt any non-hex chars would work....

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