[134265] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The tale of a single MAC
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Graham Wooden)
Sat Jan 1 23:49:02 2011
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2011 22:47:38 -0600
From: Graham Wooden <graham@g-rock.net>
To: Brielle Bruns <bruns@2mbit.com>,
<nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <4D1FF814.50306@2mbit.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Two different suppliers - one was out of Wisconsin (I believe; it's been
some time), and the other of Phoenix for the most recent batch.
I have lots and lots of HP server gear - and never encountered such bizarre
issue.
On 1/1/11 9:59 PM, "Brielle Bruns" <bruns@2mbit.com> wrote:
> On 1/1/11 8:33 PM, Graham Wooden wrote:
>> So =AD here is the interesting part... Both servers are HP Proliant DL380 =
G4s,
>> and both of their NIC1 and NIC2 MACs addresses are exactly the same. No=
t
>> spoofd and the OS drivers are not mucking with them ... They=B9re burned-i=
n =AD
>> I triple checked them in their respective BIOS screen. I acquired these=
two
>> machines at different times and both were from the grey market. The =B3Wh=
at
>> the ...=B2 is sitting fresh in my mind ... How can this be?
>=20
>=20
> From the same grey market supplier?
>=20
> I know HP has a disc they put out which updates all the firmware/bios in
> a specific server model, its not too far fetched that a vendor might
> have a modified version that also either purposely or accidentally
> changes the MAC address. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure where the
> MAC is stored - maybe an eeprom or a portion of the bios flash. Or, it
> could be botched flashing that blew away the portion of memory where
> that was stored and the system defaulted to a built in value.
>=20
> Excellent example is, IIRC, the older sparc stuff, where the ethernet
> cards didn't have MAC addresses as part of the card, but were stored in
> non-volatile or battery backed memory. Memory goes poof, and you'll
> have problems. Some WRT54G/WAP54Gs suffer from the same problem when
> throwing third party firmware on there.
