On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:

>On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 01:30:30PM +1000, matthew green wrote:
>>
>>     > The problem is the hme does not have its MAC address on it.
>>     > (Current driver uses MAC address in sparc NVRAM)
>>     > How should we handle it on other ports?
>>
>>    What about HME add-in boards?  It's gotta be in there somewhere.
>>
>>
>> i spent quite some time attempting to find the ethernet address on my
>> PCI hme card.  i failed.  i'm willing to test code anyone happens to
>> have, though.
>
>Unfortunately, it doesn't "gotta be in there somewhere".  Since the
>ethernet address is technically a *node* address, not an *interface*
>address, some workstation vendors (Sun included) use the same MAC addr on
>every interface on the box.

I remember looking at this when I was doing some rearrangement of the
rc scripts under SunOS 4.1.X (because we had a number of machines where
the primary network interface was FDDI, which was started too late the
way Sun did it).

AFAIR, there was one MAC address stored in the EEPROM, and one in each
network interface (or at least le and nf).  At initialisation, the
OpenBoot firmware overwrote the address in each interface with the
EEPROM address.  However, there was some way (maybe an option to
ifconfig) which would read the interface's own MAC address, which you
could then set back on the interface.

Roger

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Roger Brooks (Systems Programmer),          |  Email: R.S.Brooks@liv.ac.uk
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