Deleted all the back-and-forthing and will only include what finally worked. Sheesh, I got buried in the cruft on this one. Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules to have your REAL mac addr: SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="02:c3:04:01:77:c3", ATTR{type}=="1", KERNEL=="eth*", NAME="eth0" Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 with the mac addr you want: MACADDR=02:67:15:00:01:79 REBOOT! running start_udev at this point only added the eth1 entry again. The kernel was so confused that I needed to 'clean house'. # ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 02:67:15:00:01:79 inet addr:208.83.67.179 Bcast:208.83.67.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: 2607:f4b8:3:3:67:15ff:fe00:179/64 Scope:Global inet6 addr: fe80::67:15ff:fe00:179/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:134 errors:0 dropped:11 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:16489 (16.1 KiB) TX bytes:6313 (6.1 KiB) Interrupt:87 Base address:0x6000 I got my desired MAC addr, my static IPv4 addr, and IPv6 RA + MAC = desired IPv6 addr. Now to reveal why I went to these efforts. STATIC IPv6 is badness when you want to be able to change prefixes but have 'nice' IPv6 addresses. So I studied how IPv6 suffixes are currently constructed, decided what I wanted, and off to the races. Well another reason, is I will be working in IEEE 802 MAC privacy Study Group, and wanted to see what COULD be done to create privacy-enhancing MAC addresses. But thank you ALL for your efforts!