Ethernet card without HWaddr / MAC address ?

[Bruno Costacurta]

Hi All,

(first of all my apologize if this mailing list is not the relevant place for 
my question)

I use FC4 and installed a PCI Ethernet card based on chip RealTek 8139
and received the following info during probing:

(...)
8139too Fast Ethernet driver 0.9.27
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] enabled at IRQ 10
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:0b.0[A] -> Link [LNKG] -> GSI 10 (level, low) -> 
IRQ 10
8139too: 0000:01:0b.0: unknown chip version, assuming RTL-8139
8139too: 0000:01:0b.0: TxConfig = 0xffffffff
eth1: RealTek RTL8139 at 0xb800, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff, IRQ 10
eth1:  Identified 8139 chip type 'RTL-8139'
(...)

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 ?
but when starting pppoe:
(...)
13 17:08:14 localhost adsl-connect: ADSL connection lost; attempting 
re-connection.
Aug 13 17:08:19 localhost pppd[4479]: pppd 2.4.2 started by root, uid 0
Aug 13 17:08:19 localhost pppoe[4480]: Interface eth1 has broadcast/multicast 
MAC address??
Aug 13 17:08:19 localhost pppd[4479]: Couldn't get channel number: 
Input/output error
Aug 13 17:08:19 localhost pppd[4479]: Exit.
(...)

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

Thanks,
Bruno