On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Mark White wrote:

> Berndt Josef Wulf writes:
> > Mark White wrote
> > > Can somebody enlighten me: is it possible to change the
> > > ethernet [MAC, ie xx.xx.xx.xx.xx.xx] address of a network
> > > interface?
> >
> > AFAIK, you can't... MAC addresses are uniques numbers assigned to NICs at
> > time of production by the manufacturer.
>
> Indeed, the default MAC address is stored in (usually) ROM
> or EPROM on the card, and only a very small number of NICs
> allow you to change this.
>
> However, on pretty much every NIC around, this is just the
> *default* address for packet control; the address actually
> *used* for incoming and outgoing packets doesn't have to be
> the default hardware address.  Some systems (linux and
> solaris, in particular) implement an ioctl for doing so; you
> can do something like "ifconfig eth0 hw 00:11:22:33:44:55"
> in linux, or "ifconfig ne1 ether 00:11:22:33:44:55" in
> solaris [I forget the exact syntax].

I thought (the ioctl at least) has been implemented in -current whithin the
last few months, there was some talk about VRRP at the time too.

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