Changing MAC address - Broadcom 4400 NIC card

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Sat Jun 7 20:26:08 UTC 2008


| From: William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| 1] Call the ISP and ask them to swap the MAC address.

Best.

| 2] Change the MAC address of the second host to the MAC address of the
| first host.

Should be possible.  In this kind of application, it is often called
"cloning" the MAC address.

| I would like to attempt the 2rd option first. I. am using Redhat EL 5
| on one of the host and have edited
| /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to replace the old MAC with
| host 1 MAC address. However on restarting the interface, the following
| message appears
| 
| Device eth0 has a MAC address XX:XX:....., instead of configured
| address XX:XX:..... Ignoring
| 
| I suspect the kernel is still checking the chipset MAC address before
| bring up the interface. Are there tools on RHEL5  that can change the
| MAC address of the ethernet  NIC?

I'm not sure of the following.  I've not done it and I've not tested.

HWADDR is supposed to be the real/original/power-on MAC address.  RHEL
uses this so that the ethernet interface assignments are not affected
by the vargueries of PCI bus enumeration.  Each config file identifies
what card it applies to by that MAC address (HWADDR in the config
file).

If you want to change the MAC address, I think that you need to set
MACADDR in ifcfg-eth0.  See how this variable is used in various
scripts in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
For example:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth:103:   ip link set dev ${DEVICE} address ${MACADDR}
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