[mythtv-users] Yet another motherboard Grrr. The ASUS M2N-MX SE PLUS

[Roger Heflin]

Mark Greenwood wrote:
>> PCI: BIOS Bug: MCFG area at e0000000 is not E-820-reserved
>> PCI: Not using MMCONFIG
>> 0000:00:07.0 Invalid Mac address detected: b5:52:17:C6:1f:00
>> Please complain to your hardware vendor. Switching to a random MAC.
> 
> The MAC address is the hardware address of your network adapter. This is very strange, I've worked in LAN networking for 20 years
>  and never come across that. It's the right number of digits so I'm not sure why it's complaining.
>

About 1-2 years ago, with nvidia chipset based boards, a couple of different MB 
makers started accidently reseting the MAC addresses to a "default" one on a 
bios update, I know at least 2-3 different MB makers had the issue (so it leads 
one to believe that the problem was deeper than the MB maker), though it at 
least some of those cases the MAC address was obviously funny, 
(AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF), I know in at least one of the MB makers updates the MAC 
address did not look funny until you noticed that several different machines now 
had the same MAC address, and it was possible to put all of those possible 
"default" mac addresses into software to catch and inform of being suspect.

I would suggest seeing if you MB has a label on it telling you what its mac 
address is (the box may have that on it), and see if it matches what Linux is 
seeing, if it does not, then either the bios update reset it incorrectly, or 
Linux is reading it incorrectly.   If you watch the network boot it should also 
indicate what MAC address it is attempting to boot, and if that matches what 
Linux sees, and does not match what the MB says, something happened.

If the bios update did mess it up, there are usually utilities/options to 
correct it sometimes on the bios update utility, sometimes on other utilities, 
if needed the MB maker can likely tell you the procedure to correct it.

                         Roger