On Mon, 17 Dec 2001, Eric Seppanen wrote: > Why would you want ethernet address stored there? The ethernet chip I > use requires a serial EEPROM to be attached to it for the storage of > address plus other design-specific details. Don't other chips work that > way?
I don't want it stored there :=) Some recent motherboards are putting ethernet address in CMOS instead of the serial EEPROM. Yes, I know this is stupid: I have one board with a MAC address of 0:0:0:0:0:0, because I slipped and zeroed CMOS once. But the vendors are doing it. What they seem to do in some cases is copy the CMOS-based address to FLASH when you update BIOS. Then each time they come up the copy the FLASH-based address to CMOS. This allows them to hope that you never accidently zero CMOS while upgrading FLASH. Yeah right. But yes, I agree it is dumb, but I can't do anything about it. ron
