addresses of NICs (why are they the same)

[gfunk123]

I am training to be support on our solaris based network and was wondering why solaris seems to assign the same mac address to all NICs placed in the machine regardless of how many NICs are in there, when i do a ifconfig -a all nics have same MAC.

Presumably this is a feature and there is reasoning behind it. But i cant work out why it would do it

any ideas

 

[jimbopalmer]

One scenario where you want all the cards to have the same MAC is multi link trunking, where they also all have the same IP, and work to increase throughput. I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[bigscouse]

One reason you may wish to do it:
You have a box on 4 seperate networks, you can identify this box on each network by it's address as it is always the same.
You can reset the address if you wish to.

Ged Jones

Top man

 

[soleblazer]

To change it in prom do this:

setenv local-mac-address? true

This makes the box use the nics mac address's.

If they are all on one subnet I would do this as I have seen problems...