Bug#292730: installation-reports: install ok; SiS900 Ethernet hack for MAC addr

[Marc SCHAEFER <schaefer@alphanet.ch>]

Package: installation-reports
Severity: important


Apparently, the 2.4.27 kernel in RC2 (at least)  and also 2.4.27-2-k7 
has a faulty sis900 driver which is unable to extract the MAC address 
from the NVRAM.

   eth0: SiS 900 PCI Fast Ethernet at 0xd400, IRQ 19, ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff.

This means that the installation is difficult with CDs (no net access) 
or impossible (netinst CD in my case).

A temporary work-around exists:

   beast1:/home/schaefer# cat /etc/rcS.d/S39macaddress 
   #! /bin/sh

   case $1 in
      start) echo "Setting up buggy MAC address for now ..."
             ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:00:00:00:00:42;;
   esac

(don't forget to chmod a+rx /etc/rcS.d/S39macaddress and reboot)

However obviously the :42 here is a bad choice.  AFAIK there was a 
discussion and a patch in linux-kernel haven't tried it yet.

Notably people with an K7S41GX or similar from ASrock motherboard will 
experience this issue.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)