odd MAC addresses [was Re: Looking for an ASUS motherboard that net boots...]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
| 
| On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 10:51:31AM -0400, Colin McGregor wrote:
| > The board has the MAC address : db:b3:db:60:1d:00 . This is a
| > broadcast MAC address.
| 
| So it has address 00:1d:60:db:b3:db when not read in reverse.  That
| would make sense.

I had an odd MAC attack yesterday.

I have a dual booting PC on my LAN.  The MAC address of the ethernet
interface is 00:0D:87:03:CA:4F.  But in WinXP, my DHCP server seemed
to giving it the wrong settings.  It turned out that the computer was
using MAC address B2:AE:37:E7:B3:30.

It seems to be a side effect of "Network Bridge" miniport device or
driver.  When I got rid of it, the correct MAC address was used.  I
don't know why the Network Bridge was there; it seemed to want to
bridge the firewire and ethernet networks.

As with many networking problem, it was difficult to discover the
disease from the symptoms.  The original symptom was that I could not
set up a Linux box to use the printer connected to the Windows box.  I
could not even see it by "browsing".  Compounding this was the fact
that I'd not really done this before.  I got diverted trying to figure
out a known Samba bug (which doesn't seem to affect me).  It could be
that other aspects of the bridging were actually what interfered with
the printer sharing.
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