I'm having a bear of a time with Fedora yarrow and networking on a  
laptop.  I'm on a dell using:

Xircom pcmcia NIC/modem using xircom_cb
builtin 3com 3c556 using 3c59x driver


Yesterday, somehow while I was manually setting up which interface should  
be eth0/eth1 and setting the driver aliases etc, both NICs got the same  
MAC address.  ifconfig as well as "ip -o link show" reported the NICs  
having the same MAC addr.  I searched the system for anything that would  
be setting it and found nothing.  all of the ifcfg-eth*  scripts in  
/etc/sysconfig were not setting hwaddr, the redhat-config-network gui also  
showed them having the same hwaddr, even when using the "bind to MAC addr"  
button and the "probe" button.  I deleted both interfaces using the  
network gui config tool and recreated them - no dice - still had the same  
addr.

I finally broke down and reinstalled.  during the install I set one NIC  
(eth0) up to use dhcp and be active on boot The other (eth1) is static  
(0.0.0.0) and and active at boot.  They now have unique MAC address.

So my question is:  What does the installer do to get the REAL MAC address  
 from the hardware?  Is there a command or utilitiy to probe NIC hardware  
and get the MAC?

Now that I have reinstalled, I get unique MAC addr, but the networking  
isn't working after a boot until I do a "service network restart"...  the  
network restart seems to do a couple of things:

1) It will get me an appropriate ip address for the network I'm on.  Most  
of the time upon reboot, I get the IP address that the last dhcp server  
gave me - like a 192.168.0.100 address even though I'm on a 10.1.103.x  
address.

2) It will add a default route.

I don't understand why it doesn't do this at boot time.  Any place I can  
start checking for errors?

thanks
johnnyf



_______________________________________________
TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list