The past few days I've been trying to solve a mystery. I've run a disability chat room for 17 years now and the whole time we have had our own custom chat client that connects to a customized ircd. For the identd portion of the connect, I have always used an 8 digit random number but as of v3 of the client, I seeded the random number generator with their MAC address so their identd would be the same if they re-installed. I have always been under the impression that no two devices would ever share the same MAC. Note that this isn't a security issue for the site, it's just a convenience thing for me.
In the last couple of months, 4 people have come in with duplicate id's. This has never happened before. Finally today a new guy came in and he turned out to be a programmer too so we talked about it and he gave me his pc's mac address. 58-2c-80-13-92-63. On a whim, I googled it and holy crap! I'm going to switch algorithms but I'm still curious, is it normal for vendors to recycle MAC addresses? Daniel -- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | Daniel P. Stasinski | [email protected] --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
