> Well, without a valid MAC address the function cannot work...
It should not break in such ugly way either, imo.

> On the other hand, I would not worry too much: 
> uuid._ifconfig_getnode() is an internal function; and since all the
> other tests pass, uuid.getnode() probably has other ways to get a 
> unique identifier for the machine.
Here test_uuid fails due to this issue. Which in turn prevents my python3 rpm from being build.

> And by the way, in python 3.2, the test function is skipped with this 
> message: 
> """WARNING: uuid._ifconfig_getnode is unreliable on many platforms.
>    It is disabled until the code and/or test can be fixed properly."""
That does not seem to be true anymore in Python 3.2.2.

Would be nice if you could detect the all-zero case and just skip the test in that case.