[weblacky]

So I was doing the final check on a Indy I've been working on.  It has a normal DS1386-8K-150 RTC IC in it, keeps time, boots fine (though I bought the system last year...so fraudulent Dallas ebay seller during previous owner isn't ruled out).  Originally, I saw the machine was complaining about a bad MAC address...but had something like 08:01:69:....  So I said to myself, "Ah I guess the previous owner didn't set the MAC address correctly after replacing the RTC in the past...no biggie".  So I then tried to set it.  It took several methods/struggles but after a cold start and checking using SINGLE mode with netstat -ia...it matched the label.  I shut it down and unplugged it for the night.

I came back this afternoon and rechecked the MAC address.  Booting without error, but the GUI System Info and netstat -ia both say 08:00:69:XX:XX:XX...where the Xs are NOT FF but something different!!!

I have now witnessed this happen 3 times!!!!  The first part (first 3 values) are solid and don't seem to change, but the final 3 keep changing!!!  I'm running 6.5.19 (because I have the CROM media for now).

Has anyone seen this symptom before?  I'm moving ahead to another Indy that must have a BAD RTC as it doesn't know the time and I have to double-bump the reset (with rebuilt PSU, even) to get it to chime and start (and sometimes it errors on a CPU mem error).  I think it's bad NVRAM values messing up booting on the last one so I'll be drilling an RTC anyway.  But the previous Indy (the one I mentioned in the beginning) boots all the time, knows the time I set, and keeps the SGI-specific MAC address values...but keeps changing the last three values.

What the heck?