Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 07:40:36 +1200 From: Jamie Walker <jj.walker@auckland.ac.nz> To: Andrew Hesford <ajh3@chmod.ath.cx> Cc: Edward <edward_gess@hotmail.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MAC Message-ID: <20010329074036.C16495@auckland.ac.nz> In-Reply-To: <20010328093519.A12297@cec.wustl.edu>; from ajh3@chmod.ath.cx on Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 09:35:19AM -0600 References: <3AC19A18.EDCF8A4@hotmail.com> <20010328093519.A12297@cec.wustl.edu>
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On Wed, Mar 28, 2001 at 09:35:19AM -0600, Andrew Hesford wrote:
> The MAC address of a network card is hard-wired. Occassionally, the card
> manufacturer will let you change a few digits, but this is dangerous and
> can lead to network problems.
>
> I'm not sure who grants blocks of MAC addresses to card manufacturers,
> it might be the FCC, or it might be ICANN.
>
> The idea behind a MAC address is to give a unique identifier to the
> card, so protocols like TCP can figure out where to send packets.
from the man pages - ifconfig(8)
lladdr addr
Set the link-level address on an interface. This can be used to
e.g. set a new MAC address on an ethernet interface, though the
mechanism used is not ethernet-specific. The address addr is
specified as a series of colon-separated hex digits. If the in-
terface is already up when this option is used, it will be
briefly brought down and then brought back up again in order to
insure that the receive filter in the underlying ethernet hard-
ware is properly reprogrammed.
This usually means the card must be placed in promiscuous mode.
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