Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 60032
Overriding MAC address
Last modified: 2014-03-16 22:25:37 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; T312461; Q312461) Description of problem: The RHL documents don't explain how to configure the /etc/sysconfig/network- scripts/ifcfg-eth? files to override the MAC address of network adapters. The scripts seem not to work properly but, without documentation, I can't be sure that I'm modifying them correctly. It's necessary to be able to override MAC addreses because some major manufacturers of network adapters seem to be unable to avoid assigning duplicate MAC addresses. The systems in question are servers and therefore don't have X installed; so, using netconfig isn't an attractive option. Moreover, I see a bug report claiming that netconfig doesn't seem to work right either. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Search documentation for explanation of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg- eth? and how those scripts are used by /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifdown. Actual Results: I found no explanation. I then proceeded to debug the related scripts, without succeeding in understanding how they SHOULD work in this situation. They appear NOT to work. But, without documentation, I can't draw any reliable conclusion in that regard. Expected Results: I expected to find a list of the environment variables used in these scripts and the functions associated with those variables, including examples for common situations, including the need to override a MAC address. Additional info: Workaround is to add an ifconfig command to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit. But, that's not how this should work, is it? Based on my study of the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup script, it is clearly intended to handle overriding of MAC addresses. Since that script is part of the initscripts package, I filed this bug report against initscripts, rather than some more obviously related component.
in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 MACADDR=00:50:54:C0:FF:EE will change the MAC address
Well, my hope was that specifying MACADDR would change the MAC address. However, the code tried to match the specified value with the current actual value and terminated when it found the mismatch. So, to be frank, I expect that a bug lurks here. But, given the absence of documentation, I thought it best to verify exactly how the scripts should work before assuming that my way -- and ChrisMcc's -- was correct. At the least, I suspect something more is necessary than merely specifying MACADDR.
Closing bugs on older, no longer supported, releases. Apologies for any lack of response. If this persists on a current release, such as Fedora Core 4, please open a new bug.