I've seen some corporate LANs where the administrator set the mac addresses on the desktop PCs to indicate the building, floor and room that the machine was located in. It made it easy when tracking down a network problem with a sniffer on a large flat LAN to find where the physical location of the node with a problem was.
B.T.W., MAC addresses appear to be changeable in almost every LAN networked device these days (Lucent 802.11b wireless cards, LinkSys NAT/SOHO routers WAN interfaces -- via the web interface -- this way you can easily swap out the PC you had connected to your cable modem and swap in the LinkSys even if the cable ISP has locked your cable connection to your PC's MAC address, though most don't.). - H. Morrow Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On 12 Feb 2002, at 14:36, Marc Sahr wrote: > > > Huh? How can a hard-coded mac address be changed? It's burned into the > > NIC controller chip, and every single network-attached device has a > > unique MAC address. I've never heard of being able to change them. > > > > Marc > > It's not, typically, read from the ROM every time it's needed. > It's read *ONCE* during startup, into a buffer in the driver, and > that be overwritten by later code. > And the tools to do THAT are commonly supplied with the OS, because > you might be replacing a former NIC (or entire machine) in a context > where the old MAC address is known and perhaps embedded in various > other devices. Easier to mimic the old node than to hunt down every > reference.... > > DG > > _______________________________________________ > Firewalls mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.gnac.net/mailman/listinfo/firewalls
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