Re: Managing interface with random MAC address

[Russ Dill <russ dill gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 12:47 -0700, Russ Dill wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 5:33 AM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
>> > 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?
>>
>> The serial number is zero. The unique identifier is that its usb0.
>
> And there's the problem.  It won't always be usb0.  If you have two, it
> could be usb1.  Thus there isn't any unique identifier.

In my situation, I don't care. Currently, if I want this to work, I
have to change the hardware address in the network manager settings
every single time I reboot the board. The limitation of only being
able to plug in one at a time seems rather minor to me.

> Dan
>
>> > 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.
>>
>> I may have got my managed/unmanaged terminology confused. Right now,
>> NetworkManager handles all devices not listed int
>> /etc/network/interfaces. I have two wired devices, one is my permanent
>> eth0. eth0 I want nm to manage. The other is the beagle board.
>
>