View Full Version : [all variants] updated my BIOS, now my mac address is random

March 15th, 2009, 07:33 AM

I had a fairly stable hardy system. But there was one thing that was wrong, in that every time I would power it down I needed to blank the BIOS settings for it to reboot. So today I replaced the BIOS chip on the motherboard. (Bought a new one for this motherboard off of ebay.) Good news, now I can power down my system and power it back on without having to blank the BIOS settings!

...except now my mac address changes with every boot. There are no messages in /var/log/kern.log about an invalid mac (which seems to be the only results I can dig up on ubuntu forums). The system SEEMS happy, except that the #$$&T^$&^T!! mac address keeps changing on every boot!

If I use the following for /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Then the ethernet interface will come up with a random mac. (And because it's a random mac, it gets a random IP address from DHCP.)

I tried changing /etc/network/interfaces to read:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
pre-up ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:1e:8c:7d:9c:22

and rebooted. Unfortunately that doesn't work. The interface will come up, but NEVER get an IP address from dhcp.

Help! What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!