On 13 August 2010 21:20, Steve Gaarder <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> SL5 has a bug in the driver for the Realtek RTL8169sc/8110sc ethernet cards,
> presumably inherited from RedHat.  Basically, the most recent versions of
> this driver, such as that in 2.6.18-194.11.1.el5, write the MAC address back
> to the card at shutdown, but do it badly, zeroing out the leading 4 bytes of
> the address.  This changes the card's address until the next power-cycle. A
> bug report has been filed for Fedora, number 573201, but I don't see one for
> RHEL.

As SL 5.x is a derivative of RHEL 5.x I would like to suggest that you
try using the kABI tracking, kernel independent kmod-r8169 package [1]
that is available from the ELRepo Project [2].

That driver package is built using the latest available source code
from Realtek and is rtl8169 specific, unlike the "one size fits all"
version that is in the RHEL (and, hence, SL) kernel.

Alan.

[1] http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-r8169
[2] http://elrepo.org