[Gllug] Fedora 16 MAC Address

[Chris Miles]

On 16/04/12 15:39, Nix wrote:
> If this driver cannot get a valid MAC address off the card's EEPROM, it
> grabs a random one using random_ether_addr(), which always sets the
> locally administered address bit.
This seems to be the core of the issue, all the addresses reported have
the top bit set, they are 'locally administered' and overwrite the
card's built in MAC.

ifconfig allow this locally-administered address to be configured, man
ifconfig gives:

"hw class address
    "Set  the  hardware  address of this interface, if the device driver
supports this operation.  The keyword must be followed by the name of
the hardware class and the printable ASCII equivalent of the hardware
address.  Hardware classes currently supported include ether (Ethernet),
ax25 (AMPR  AX.25),  ARCnet  and  netrom (AMPR NET/ROM)."

e.g.
ifconfig eth0 hw ether ascii-mac-address

So it looks as if something is auto-assigning a locally-administered MAC
address.
- a driver 'feature' that is 'on' when it should not be?


You can also use ethtool to examine and change the current state of an
interface
man ethtool

ethtool -i eth0
- shows details of driver, version, etc, e.g.

$ sudo ethtool -i eth0
driver: r8169
version: 2.3LK-NAPI
firmware-version:
bus-info: 0000:03:00.0

HTH,
  Chris

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