SOLVED : Raspberry Pi change => netplan's physical match > macaddress causes the device to be unreachable

Hello,

I have OMV 6.9.15-2 (Shaitan) installed on a Raspberry Pi 4. It happened that the PiCard hard to be replaced because it burnt out. I bought the exact same HW (memory, HW version, etc.) to simply swap the SDCard from one Pi_card to another (along with the power supply and network cable).

My network configuration is static (I cannot act on the DHCP server and I do not want to anyway). I want to rely solely (and in fact this is the only way I have) on the static configuration.

I only use one physical ethernet interface (eth0), no wireless either.

After the SDcard swap I could not access the OMV box. The reason was that the eth0 interface did not come up because the netplan YAML configuration file generated by OMV includes a mac > macaddress directive. The MAC address was the one of the previous RaspberryPi card...

At that time I had no microHDMI adaptor so I couldn't see/access the console interface. Once I got a screen/keyboard plugged on it, I could eventually sort this out by changing the mac address in the YAML file and make eth0 up and running.

My question and request is : is there a solution to prevent OMV to set this 'macaddress' directive in the netplan configuration file ? If not, could this be an enhancement for a future release (to prevent the macaddress usage) ?

I can understand the need/usage for a regular computer but for the RaspberryPi like cards this is a burden as a hardware swap cannot be effortless as it usually is. Indeed we have a physical access to the device when we swap the SDCard but we may not be the one to perform the action (in my case I was in a remote location and I had given instructions to follow to a "non computer speaking" person : "simply remove the SD card and move it to the new device and plug the network cable").

Even if I had a DHCP configuration I would not have had access to the device because the DHCP server would have allocated a random IP to which the remote OpenVPN connection wouldn't have been redirected...

Thank you for your explanations.

Hello

To answer the first comment fromage Chente, the purpose of my request was to avoid the need to use the console Access. So using the firstaid cli is not really better. When you are stuck remotely it is useless. Yet, this could be an idiot proof solution to help the "non computer scientist" who has the physical access to the Raspberry.

To answer Votdev's message, using the macaddress directive is useless when you only have one physical ethernet interface like on Pi boards : eth0 (the other interface IS the wireless wlan0). Netplan's configuration des notnneed it (I never configured it before on other devices...) So the request would be to get rid of this for the dedicated Pi Board distribution.