[134280] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The tale of a single MAC
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lynda)
Sun Jan 2 22:32:47 2011
Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:31:53 -0800
From: Lynda <shrdlu@deaddrop.org>
To: Nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <CE703E11-98E7-4317-BE27-AA5B65A67BBB@americafree.tv>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 1/2/2011 6:00 PM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Corey Quinn wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 2, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
>>> In the early 90's a friend of mine got a box of 10 HP cards with
>>> all the same MAC address.
>> In my early days of network admining, a coworker told me a
>> (apocryphal) story of 3com shipping a batch of 80K cards with
>> identical MAC addresses, which they then had to recall.
>> Unfortunately a cursory Google turns up nothing, so I suppose he
>> was either misinformed or pulling my leg.
> I have also heard such stories, again from the '90s. Can cause odd
> failure modes.
Google does NOT know all. I was there. I have had to deal with a
building full of such wickedness. I administered DNS (in my copious
spare time) for two subdomains, and managed the network in the building
(a not inconsiderable /22, and also in my spare time), and started
getting frantic calls from people who were getting knocked off the
network because their machine had the same MAC address as another.
I had trouble believing it at first, but after dealing with five of them
(all Gateways, and yes, all with the same MAC address), I directed the
local sysadmins to disable the nic that came with them, and to replace
it with a spare. I understand that there were 30,000 of them, all with
the same address. My guess is that you'll never find it on Google, since
it happened around 1993-4 or so.
--
A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately
described with pictures.
