Ethernet card without HWaddr / MAC address ?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Sat, 2005-08-13 at 11:24, Bruno Costacurta wrote:

> 
> and when using ifconfig:
> eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
>           inet6 addr: fe80::fdff:ffff:feff:ffff/64 Scope:Link
>           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
>           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:4294960281 overruns:0 frame:0
>           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
>           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
>           RX bytes:0 (0.0 b)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
>           Interrupt:10 Base address:0xb800
> 
> which seems correct ?

> 
> My questions:
> - what about an ethernet card without detected HWaddr ?
> - does it prevent to use it for pppoe or any Ethernet connections ?

A MAC address of all 1's (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF) is the broadcast address. 
You need to check the configuration files to see if the MAC address has
been set to this.   If it has it won't work.