There could be numerous reasons to create a fake Ethernet interface on a Linux server though I have heard that people might do so to get around licensing of software that is tied to the MAC address of a specific Ethernet port. You really just enable a dummy Ethernet interface and assign the MAC address to it which is explain in more detail below. The easiest way to do this is to simply assign a MAC address to an Ethernet interface you are not using on your server where the drivers have already been installed automatically. If you do not have a spare Ethernet interface then the instructions below will assist you to accomplish your goal.

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If you have been following my progress over the last few days you will know that after a complete rebuild of the tools server and a change of the operating system, I have been working hard to get all our temp monitoring back online. The server previously ran Gentoo Linux, which although is still my favorite distro, is just not suited for a production server environment.  So we decided to go with Cent OS which is a very well built distro aimed at running on production servers. My only complaint is that its kernel and some of its packages are a little bit out of date.  On the bright side, this has given us a few challenges to work through and more importantly some good articles to share.  So after getting my GPU temps going and graphing I turned my attention to the cpu. We are currently running a Intel i7 965 Extreme edition which I just put in last night. In the following article I will show how I eventually got lm_sensors and the coretemp module to work on Cent OS 5.4

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I started an install of Gentoo Linux this morning on a desktop at my house so I could test some browser stuff that purehate was seeing via his Gentoo laptop. I don’t think I have ever installed Gentoo but its possible a couple years back I installed it in the same scenario. Anyway I decided to download the x86 minimal install CD for the installation. After it was burned to CD I booted my desktop up and started the install. Once it was booted I configured the network interface, which in this case was eth0, and was able to test without issue to the Internet using ping. I proceeded with the installation including writing the partition table, creating the file system, and mounting my drives. The next step involved using links to open a gentoo.org URL to select a mirror and to my surprise it failed. Below I go into detail about the problem I ran into and the steps I took to resolve the issue. 

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