Hey everybody,

I have a "proprietary" box from a vendor (an appliance). The only
problem with getting OpenBSD on it was initializing the network
interfaces. dmesg:

em0 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "Intel PRO/1000MT (82573L)" rev 0x00:
msiem0: Invalid mac address

Its a security thing I'm sure as they don't have valid MAC addresses
in the EEPROM. The vendor's own Linux image just adds the correct MAC
addresses in later after bootup.

My solution was to edit the em driver, I just assign a bogus MAC
address (all 0's) if the one it detects from EEPROM is invalid, and
don't error out. Then on bootup, I load the correct MAC addresses with
ifconfig.

My suggestion is to change the way the em driver handles an invalid
MAC address. There should still be some way to bring up the
interfaces. I doubt my solution is the correct way though. Maybe there
is a better way to get the interface to initialize without changing
the em driver.

thanks,
Nate

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