Hi. I am trying installing linux on a pc featuring an a8n sli motherboard.

The board comes with two built-in ethernet cards
1) nvidia
2) marvell/sysconnect

the nvidia cards has a known bug which causes data corruption in large files downloading due to a problem in the tcp checksumming hardware, so i disabled this one.

the marvell card seems to work fine in windows, after havng set its hw address to something different from 00-00-00-00-00-00, as it comes from the factory. I know it sounds odd, but my asus board came with this kind of "setup"!

somebody suggestyed to set the hw address before hte interface gets started in the startup script by using the command

ifconfig eth0 hw ether 01:02:03:04:05:06 (for example)

the questions are:
1) which is the right script to edit to put the command in?
2) is it the right command?

thank you very much

I think i remembered my dad putting it somewhere in /etc/dhcpd.conf.
look around in there.(if you use DHCP)

EDIT: i looked at mine and you need to put something in like

not really sure where to put this line as there are many weird things in mine....but it would be safe to put it everywhere you find it in /etc/dhcpd.conf

Welcome to LQ,

If you want exact answers, you should fill the "distribution" field of your profile.

Lets assume that you have a debian style distro:

Add this to your /etc/network/interfaces, under eth0 if you want this interface to be changed:

hwaddress ether 02:01:02:03:04:08

this could also be achieved maybe by putting a script before the interface is brought up:
But I'm not 100% sure that the order is ok. If not, try to move this script to /etc/network/if-up.d

ooops! I just did. as a matter of fact i am using mandriva linux for 64 bit pc
:-)
thanks

Better
put this in ifcfg-eth0 ( in /etc/network/ I think, to find it type slocate ifcfg-eth0)

MACADDR=01:02:03:04:05:06