Re: Managing interface with random MAC address

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 01:25 -0700, Russ Dill wrote:
> I have an embedded device known as a beagle board that draws power
> from my USB port (shows up as usb0). When it boots, it presents itself
> as a USB ethernet device. I want to share my connection with the
> device from network manager.
> 
> Two problems: The first is that network manager sees an unmanaged
> device and tries to obtain an IP address, the second, I can't seem to
> setup an automatic share my connection connection since every time the
> board boots, it has a different hardware address. Any tips?

What is the USB serial number of the device?  The core problem here is
that if there's no unique identifier for the device, there's no way to
lock a specific connection to that device, and thus any generic Wired
connection will be used instead.

Run "lsusb -v" and look for the iSerial field; is that field something
other than 0?  Do other beagle boards present other serial numbers?

Do you want to keep the wired device unmanaged and ignored by
NetworkManager?  You said "sees an unmanaged device and tries to obtain
an IP address", but NM should be ignoring unmanaged devices.  However,
that mechanism depends on HAL UDIs and thus the random MAC address may
well be confusing it.

Dan