mac address problem

[Glenn Satchell]

>Subject: Re: mac address problem
>From: garry saddington <garry at schoolteachers.co.uk>
>To: dhcp-users at isc.org
>Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:07:27 +0100
>
>On Sun, 2006-09-17 at 07:54 +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
>> garry saddington wrote:
>> 
>> >We bought a bunch of Wyse Winterms cheaply to use in an LTSP setup.
>> >About one third of them work perfectly by flashing them with a kernel
>> >and an initial ram disk.
>> >However, the others do not work and the problem is that they all report
>> >their mac address as 00:00:00:00:00:00.
>> 
>When these things fire up they do a flash self-check and report a good
>mac address to screen. It is only on boot when they broadcast the wrong
>address. So internally they know the correct mac address. That is why we
>suspect a kernel problem. They have come out of a large network running
>Windows NT and so they must have worked correctly some time. Another
>observation is that the ones that do not work have different motherboard
>revisions which are all made in China. The good ones are all made in
>Taiwan!!
>
>We bought 250 of these things for £1000 and about 60 are good. That
>means we still got them cheap but we would still like to get the others
>going.

<straying way off dhcp topics, but anyway ...>

Is there an internal battery that needs replacing? Even though it
offers a good mac address on boot it may need to copy this to battey
backed memory for use perhaps.

Although if there are two different motherboards and the problem
clearly is restricted to one of them then perhaps there is something in
the kernel driver that isn't picking up the mac address properly.

Do you have a windows kernel you can flash them with to confirm?

regards,
-glenn
--
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