The tale of a single MAC

[shrdlu at deaddrop.org (Lynda)]

On 1/2/2011 6:00 PM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Corey Quinn wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 2, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Franck Martin wrote:

>>> In the early 90's a friend of mine got a box of 10 HP cards with
>>> all the same MAC address.

>> In my early days of network admining, a coworker told me a
>> (apocryphal) story of 3com shipping a batch of 80K cards with
>> identical MAC addresses, which they then had to recall.

>> Unfortunately a cursory Google turns up nothing, so I suppose he
>> was either misinformed or pulling my leg.

> I have also heard such stories, again from the '90s. Can cause odd
> failure modes.

Google does NOT know all. I was there. I have had to deal with a 
building full of such wickedness. I administered DNS (in my copious 
spare time) for two subdomains, and managed the network in the building 
(a not inconsiderable /22, and also in my spare time), and started 
getting frantic calls from people who were getting knocked off the 
network because their machine had the same MAC address as another.

I had trouble believing it at first, but after dealing with five of them 
(all Gateways, and yes, all with the same MAC address), I directed the 
local sysadmins  to disable the nic that came with them, and to replace 
it with a spare. I understand that there were 30,000 of them, all with 
the same address. My guess is that you'll never find it on Google, since 
it happened around 1993-4 or so.

-- 
A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe
the picture.  Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately
described with pictures.