Actually, Solaris' version of ifconfig lets you sub in a new mac address
for your machine.  While you wouldn't normally care about being able to
perform this trick, it turns out that it is useful for testing ethernet
switches to find out what happens when you fill their content address
memories with mac addresses.  Some switches begin flooding all packets to
all ports, while others clam up completely.  It's not clear to me that
NetBSD's version of ifdconfig allows one to perform this sort of
skulduggery.
-Brian
On Feb 22, 11:45pm, Jukka Marin wrote:
} Subject: Re: Ethernet [MAC] addresses
} On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 10:03:14PM +1030, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:
} > 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. 
} 
} Well, the MAC address is usually stored in a PROM or EEPROM and copied
} from there into the Ethernet controller chip.. and it is possible to
} ignore the address and use any address you like, but .. there shouldn't
} be a need to change the address.
} 
} (Funny, I'm just writing an Ethernet driver and typed in a test MAC
} address 2 minutes ago :-)
} 
}   -jm
>-- End of excerpt from Jukka Marin