On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 11:49:33AM +0100, Julian Coleman wrote:
> > I've got two HME's in my Ultra 1 - one onboard, one SBus, and they
> > also have the same MAC address. I'm running 2.0_BETA on that machine,
> > would it be of any help (or at least informational value) if I booted
> > it up, set local-mac-address, and reported whether it did anything?
>  
> It'll only do anything if the HME has the `local-mac-address' attribute
> (property).  At the PROM prompt, if you cd to the device node and look at
> the attributes, you can see if it has the `local-mac-address' attribute.
> Try:
> 
> 	ok cd /sbus
> 	ok ls
> 	ok cd [device node of SBUS HME card - from the ls above]
> 	ok .attributes
> 
> You probably won't see a `local-mac-address' attribute for this card, so
> the kernel won't be able to set a different MAC address for it.  As I
> mentioned, it is possible to add one at the PROM prompt, but I can't
> remember the command I used to do it.

You are correct. From a quick google search, I found this:
http://www.barbary.com/cookbooks/macaddress.html
Which seems to imply that you can't do this on HME's, at least not as
shipped by Sun.

I can't find anything at the moment that explains how to set the
local-mac-address attribute (actually, it doesn't even understand
.attributes when I type that in)

I've found some sunhelp documentation that explains how to do it with
ifconfig under solaris (ifconfig <iface> ether <whatever>), but NetBSD
doesn't have an option to change a MAC address AFAIK, so I doubt that is of
any help.

A quick glance through the NVRAM/Hostid FAQ doesn't appear to have any
useful info for setting card-specific MAC addresses, just the one the whole
system uses, so I'm out of ideas.

-Sean

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