7/14    I bought several Intel GigE nics and one of them has a
        bad mac addr (all ff's). dmesg shows the card as detected,
        and proc/pci lists it, but ifconfig doesn't show an eth*
        entry for it. Does anyone know how I can set the mac addr
        so that I can use the card? (I'm using RH 9, but I can
        just as easily stick the card in a WinXP, FreeBSD or
        OpenBSD box). The card has a 82540 chip if that is of
        any use. tia.
        \_ I'm curious. Why don't you want to return the card?
           \_ maybe s/he's curious about this.  Why do think OP
              doesn't want to return the card?
           \_ If I can get the card working, then I wouldn't
              have to deal with the hassle of getting a RMA
              and shipping it back and waiting for a new one.
              I'm planning on buying several dozen more of
              these cards in the future and in case I run
              into this problem again, I'd like to know if
              it is possible to fix it.
              \_ Return it. You've already had more hassle. You know that
                 the others work, so this one is defective. Send it back
                 and leave us alone.
              \_ Return it. You've already had more hassle.
                 You know that the others work, so this one
                 is defective. Send it back and leave us
                 alone.
        \_ Some cards have the MAC address printed on them somewhere.
           \_ I know what the MAC address is supposed to be,
              I just need a way of manually setting it up
              in the eeprom of the card (linux says that
              the eeprom contains an invalid chksum, and
              the windows based card test utility from
              intel says that it can't read the eeprom)
              \_ Maybe that means the eeprom is bad?  I think you're
                 trying to hard.
        \_ FreeBSD allows you to set the MAC address.  On bootup via
           /etc/start_if.fxp0 or you can do it manually.  Either way:
           ifconfig fxp0 ether <mac address>
           Yours won't be fxp0, it'll be whatever.
           \_ Thanks, I'll give it a shot today.
              \_ It might work on your broken card, but I agree with the
                 others who say you should RMA it.