From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)

Description of problem:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifdown, line 55:

if [ -n "${HWADDR}" ]; then
    FOUNDMACADDR=`LC_ALL= LANG= ip -o link show ${REALDEVICE} | \
        sed 's/.*link\/ether \([[:alnum:]:]*\).*/\1/'`
    if [ "${FOUNDMACADDR}" != "${HWADDR}" ]; then
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The 'ip' command returns the MAC address in lower case, so if someone 
sets the value of HWADDR in his ifcfg-* in upper case the check above 
will fail.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
initscripts-7.14-1

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the value of HWADDR in your ifcfg-eth0 (for example)
   to contain uppercase characters.

2. ifup eth0

3. ifdown eth0
    

Actual Results:  An error is detected and the following message is 
printed:

 "Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring.

Expected Results:  ifdown should bring the interface down.

Additional info: