Odroid HC2 doesn't retain mac address across boots.

I have an Odroid HC2 running, and it is working well. There are a couple of problems that are annoying, that I need help with, this is about the network mac address.

I use an IPfire router, and prefer to assign ip addresses on my network by putting in the mac address on the IPfire and assigning an ip address to it.

However, the HC2 along with many kernels doesn't seem to retain the same mac address. There is no big problem if I am using statically assigned addresses, which is the solution to this, but it means I have to keep track of this special, along with some other small arm SOCs which do the same thing.

The HC2 is headless, so there is no graphics of any sort, so one has to look @ the dhcp guest pool, and then bring up admin, which worked great. But I noticed across a few reboots that I got different ip addresses each time.

Any way to get the systems to retain a single mac address? I rigged it on one system with some pain, but would prefer to know what i'm missing.

This is also the case with wireless mac addresses, though this is not about wifi.

thanks
Jim

Zitat von tkaiser

Which problem do you try to describe/address here? What does 'with many kernels' mean?
The majority of ARM devices out there does NOT have an EEPROM to store a MAC address (the vast majority of vendors does not even register MAC address ranges) so which MAC address will be finally used depends on software.

XU4/HC1/HC2 all use an internal RTL8153 USB chip for Ethernet and AFAIK there's still nowhere a MAC address stored. All older distributions therefore simply put $some MAC address in a file called boot.ini which is read by the bootloader and the specific string is then passed over to the kernel. More modern OS images might generate the MAC address differently (eg. based on the SoC's serial number) so switching between different OS images or sometimes even upgrading them might result in different MAC addresses while booting each OS image repeatedly will result in the same MAC address.

If that's what you observe (different OS images --> different MAC addresses) then that's normal, if you want to report that the OMV image we provide does boot all the time with different MAC addresses then you're the first to report and a serial console log is needed.

You are answering what I'm after. Some of the systems do retain it, and I've hacked a number of ways to assign it, and am asking what the correct approach is. I know you do a lot of the armbian stuff, including the kernel and system under this, so I can do one approach across all of my armbian systems.

I see so many people who don't know the who have problems which are related to this, and I am guessing they didn't know they were using dhcp, and would have this happen. As I said the only simple patch was static IP, which trumps the mac address changing. I'll research how to do that with the different kernels, but was looking for a recommendation from someone with your experience to recommend where to attack it. All of the equivalent type problems I saw here in the networking section were variants of people having the problem and not knowing what was causing it, and the answers not doing it either.
thanks again
jim