UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

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

This might help - found on SunSolve. You can read it by going there and doing a search for "why same ether address on all interfaces"

IEEE leaves it up to the vendor to use the station address approach vs.
per port approach. Sun uses the concept of a host-based MAC identity prior
to the newer nic cards.

Usually this does not present a problem. Only systems on the same subnet
(connected to same switch/hub) are required to have unique hardware address
(arp entries).

If you are configuring a multi-homed host with more than one interface on the
same physical subnet (connections to same hub), choosing and configuring a
unique ether address that is different from the primary host-based assigned
ethernet Mac address may be neccessary.

The older network interface drivers in Sun systems get the MAC address for the
ethernet interface from the PROM on the system. The MAC address does not come from
the ethernet chip or interface hardware. There is just one ethernet MAC address for all
interfaces on a system. The intel (ie), lance (le )ethernet interfaces along with the
SunSwift (hme) and SunFastEthernet 1.0 (be) and 2.0 Adapters (hme) use the host assigned
address of the CPU OpenBoot PROM.

Sun Microsystems reserved ethernet range starts with 8:0:20:xx:xx:xx