Here's a strange one.

I bought a new machine a couple of months ago to use as a server.

It's a duel core AMD64 (exact info escapes me) using a nforce chipset.

After the first couple of boots the ethernet quit working.

After a while I found the issue is that every reboot the actual thernet number incriments by one, so fixed ip config for a int doesn't work, and it appears dhcp doesn't work after ~eth4, so eth15 has no chance of coming up. (or eth16 or eth17.. ect)

I've worked on it off and on, but am pretty frustrated at this point.

I would reeeealy like to get this machine finished so I can do some shifting around of servers and backends in the house.

Does anyone have a fix or a workaround for this?

My bios has a built in mac address of something like 00:00:00:00:00:07.

The bios booting up would detect it was bogus, and replace it with a valid but random one.

Udev would detect the new mac address and assign a new ethernet address every boot.

I need the built in eth to work, because I need both pci slots this machine has, so I worked around the issue by editing the file /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistant-net.rules.

I deleted all ethernet lines except eth0, and changed the mac address to be "?*" so it would match any mac address that comes up.