This is certainly a poor design, as you can read many seasoned admins who have updated their iDRAC only to have it killed. One possible cause is not by doing all the incremental updates, doing updates from an old iDRAC to one many revisions newer is a sure way to kill things, but even then there is no guarantee based on the amount of failures. List of threads of people's dead iDRAC's:........

Once I set a new MAC address everything was fine and finally anything can be pinged etc.., I've had this happen with many clients in different datacenters on different hardware.........

This is something I often setup for clients because it's very helpful for people in datacenters, this allows custom OS installs on demand, you can customize it more by using kickstart etc.. but here's a base I use before customizing more: This little script below will install everything you need to get booting by PXE Linux. It also assumes you set a local IP (be sure not to overwrite your existing IP) on eth0:0 (note the :0) as 192.168.1.10 and it........

ifup eth0 SIOCSIFFLAGS: Cannot allocate memory Failed to bring up eth0 This is on a Centos 5.5 machine with OpenVZ kernel 2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.028stab091.1PAE, I updated 3 systems with the same hardware to the same kernel and for some reason the network didn't come back. This only happened once the first time I booted into the new kernel and hasn't happened again but this is a serious issue for those running systems from remote locations such as a datacente........