From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Apr 20 16:12: 0 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from freeway.dcfinc.com (cx74889-a.phnx3.az.home.com [24.1.193.157]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 58EDF37B564 for ; Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:11:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from chad@freeway.dcfinc.com) Received: (from chad@localhost) by freeway.dcfinc.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA08703; Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:11:49 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from chad) From: "Chad R. Larson" Message-Id: <200004202311.QAA08703@freeway.dcfinc.com> Subject: Re: setting Ethernet address on Ethernet card? In-Reply-To: from Ronald van der Pol at "Apr 21, 0 00:01:23 am" To: Ronald.vanderPol@surfnet.nl (Ronald van der Pol) Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 16:11:48 -0700 (MST) Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: chad@DCFinc.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL40 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG As I recall, Ronald van der Pol wrote: > Is it possible to change the Ethernet address on an Ethernet card? It depends on the card. Some can (usually more expensive, high end), some can't (clones and cheapies). Those that can are usually so as to be able to support Ethernet multicasting, or High Availablity failovers and the like. A major issue is that the Ethernet address (the MAC, in IEEE 802.3 parlance) is supposed to be unique. It =has= to be unique within any collision domain. The manufacturers work that out by allowing the IEEE to assign the first 24 bits of the address to each manufacturer, and then the manufacturer picks the lower 24 bits (like a serial number). Clever line monitors can tell you the manufacturer of the card that sent an Ethernet packet. If you multicast, the spec says you've taken upon yourself the responsibility for a unique MAC address. > If yes, how can I do this? Again, depends on the card. If it can, the place where FreeBSD should do it is in the device driver, controlled by an option to ifconfig. I don't know of any support for that. There might be an MS-DOS utility available from the manufacturer, if the card hardware supports it. -crl -- Chad R. Larson (CRL15) 602-953-1392 Brother, can you paradigm? chad@dcfinc.com chad@larsons.org larson1@home.net DCF, Inc. - 14623 North 49th Place, Scottsdale, Arizona 85254-2207 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message