From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; Q312461) Description of problem: When you want to change the MAC address of network card using MACADDR field in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* - this not works. This worked fine in 7.1 and doesn't work in 7.2 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Set MACADDR field to some valid MAC-Adress value in ifcfg-eth* 2. Run network restart 3. See, that HW address not changing. And when trying to do: ip link set eth0 address xxxxxxxxxxxx in shell, you'll get the error message: "xxxxxxxxxx is invalid lladdr" Actual Results: HW address is not changing to the value of "MACADDR" field. Expected Results: HW Address should be changed to "MACADDR" field value Additional info: Actually, the ifup script in 7.2 uses "ip" util to manage the interfaces, while 7.1 was using "ifcfg" So, when I use: ip link set eth0 address 0000F4AB9D47 I get the error message: "0000F4AB9D47" is invalid lladdr and the MAC address not changing. And when I try: ifconfig eth0 hw ether 0000F4AB9D47 Everything works fine... So, to make things working right in 7.2, I was forced to change the ifup script: I'd replaced the section in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup: if [ -n "${MACADDR}" ]; then ip link set ${DEVICE} address ${MACADDR} with this one: if [ -n "${MACADDR}" ]; then ifconfig ${DEVICE} hw ether ${MACADDR} (As it was in 7.1)
You need to colon delimit the MAC address for /sbin/ip to use it correctly. I honestly didn't know that that sort of address (without ':' delimiters) worked with the old setup.
Oh, great :) Yes, this works. Since I was unable to find any documentation in man-pages for the correct syntax of the MACADDR field earlier, when I've used 7.1 with /sbin/ifconfig - I found experimentally that entry without semicolons works fine. And I was sure that it will work fine with new ifup scripts, that are using /sbin/ip. I was wrong :)