Re: Apple Serial Number: Redux
Re: Apple Serial Number: Redux
- Subject: Re: Apple Serial Number: Redux
- From: Peter Sichel <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 10:28:33 -0500
At 2:50 PM +0100 1/23/02, Christophe Dore wrote:
I have seen in the Apple's cocoa dev list that it is possible to
change the MAC address of the ethernet card.
Thus it cannot be ensured as globally unique.
Actually, every Ethernet adaptor is required to come with a globally
unique MAC address, but it is possible to change this. Originally
this was done for DECNET which assigned MAC addresses based on
the protocol address to avoid the need for ARP. More recently
some network access devices have used this feature to clone the
MAC address of a particular host to avoid needing to re-configure
a cable modem.
In practice, very few if any users change the MAC address of a host
Ethernet adaptor, and even if they did, it must still be locally
unique and you can always change it back to the globally unique
factory setting.
- Peter
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