On Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:48:38 -0700 Jim Burwell <j...@jsbc.cc> wrote: > On 4/4/2010 08:46, Jonathan Lassoff wrote: > > Excerpts from John Peach's message of Sun Apr 04 08:17:28 -0700 2010: > > > >> On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 11:10:56 -0400 > >> David Andersen <d...@cs.cmu.edu> wrote: > >> > >> > >>> There are some classical cases of assigning the same MAC address to every > >>> machine in a batch, resetting the counter used to number them, etc.; > >>> unless shown otherwise, these are likely to be errors, not accidental > >>> collisions. > >>> > >>> -Dave > >>> > >>> On Apr 4, 2010, at 10:57 AM, jim deleskie wrote: > >>> > >>> > >>>> I've seen duplicate addresses in the wild in the past, I assume there > >>>> is some amount of reuse, even though they are suppose to be unique. > >>>> > >>>> -jim > >>>> > >>>> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 11:53 AM, A.B. Jr. <skan...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>>> > >>>>> Hi, > >>>>> > >>>>> Lots of traffic recently about 64 bits being too short or too long. > >>>>> > >>>>> What about mac addresses? Aren't they close to exhaustion? Should be. > >>>>> Or it > >>>>> is assumed that mac addresses are being widely reused throughout the > >>>>> world? > >>>>> All those low cost switches and wifi adapters DO use unique mac > >>>>> addresses? > >>>>> > >>>>> > >> Sun, for one, used to assign the same MAC address to every NIC in the > >> same box. > >> > > I could see how that *could* work as long as each interface connected to > > a different LAN. > > > That was a logic Sun used. Every NIC would be connected to a different > subnet, so duplicate MACs shouldn't be a problem. For the most part > this worked, but some situations required a unique MAC per NIC, and Sun > had a bit you could flip to turn this on. I believe it was an OpenBoot > prom variable called "local-mac-address?" which you'd set to true if you > wanted it to use each NICs MAC instead of the "system MAC".
You can set the MAC address to whatever you want in Solaris, using ifconfig and local-mac-address was (is) the PROM variable. -- John