mac address important?

[checktravis]

i bricked my goflex home (again) trying to replace arch with debian. i finally got it booting from the sata running arch (just like it was before i started messing with it) but I noticed the mac address changed. it's probably from me trying

http://goflex.scottn.us/picocom-debug.tar.gz
http://goflex.scottn.us/uboot.uart
picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

and then sending the uboot.art file. i think that might have changed the mac address. it took a lot of experimentation to get it back to working order. so, if having a different mac address isn't a problem, i am not going to mess with it

[summers]

Good question, and alas I don't know authorativly if you *must* set the correct mac address. Yes of course its possible to fake a mac address. But anyway gut feeling is that it has to be best to set the right mac address. Again I can't say why that is the case, so others on the ethernet can idenify for ethernet hardware just doesn't seem like a good answer.

Anyway how to change the mac address, on my NSA325 the mac address is taken from uboot, which sets it. Now don't know how the goflex boots - but wouldn't be surprised if the ethernet is set there. So have a look in "fw_printenv", now easy way to change it would be to add a line to the end of /boot/uEnv.txt

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', '
ethaddr=12:34:45:56:78:9A
')

means ethaddr wouldn't be set till late in uboot (so not so easy to do a network boot from uboot), but should be enough to set the addres in linux.

Hope this helps, isn't really a good answer.

[jeajea]

If you have two devices on the same subnet with the same MAC address one or both
devices won’t work correctly. A device should not have a 00:00:00:00:00:00 or
ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff.
Also, there are other reserved MAC addresses that could cause problems.