On Friday, 14 May 1999 at 15:43:15 -0400, Mark J. Taylor wrote:
> On 14-May-99 Daniel Eischen wrote:
>>>> Is it possible to change the mac address of an ethernet card using
>>>> ifconfig?
>>>
>>> Not in any 'standard' card, no.  Some cards (in SUN workstations) allow
>>> you to swap the EEPROM with the mac address, and I'll bet somewhere
>>> someone has designed a card with a programmable mac address, but
>>> normally it's not settable.
>>
>> Yeah, we've got some Dy-4 m68k-based single board computers that
>> allow the lower 3 bytes of the MAC address to be programmed.  It's
>> kind of annoying though, because the lower 3 bytes are always
>> set to 0 and we have to uniquely set them for each board that
>> we deliver to our customer.
>>
>> The MAC addresses were meant to be unique; why do you want the
>> ability to change them?  So you can make M$ viruses without
>> anyone figuring it out who made them ;-)?
>
> One of the purposes of changing the MAC address is for server
> redundancy.

Yes, and in fact Tandem^H^H^H^H^H^HCompaq use this for their NonStop
Ethernet.  The machine has two ethernet boards.  If one goes down, the
other assumes its identity.

It seems there's a need, and the possibility.  Would somebody like to
suggest a syntax?

Greg
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