In SPARC Servers running Sun Solaris, you can see multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) or interfaces are all sharing a single MAC-Address than having a unique Factory-default MAC-Address assigned to it. This is because by default, a System-Wide MAC-Address is assigned to all the NICs and hence a ifconfig -a output will show only one MAC-Address.
To confirm this behaviour
root@solarisserver# eeprom local-mac-address?
local-mac-address?=false
The output “local-mac-address?=false” indicates that the factory-default Mac-Address is not being used and a system-wide MAC-Address is used.
To make the NICs use their factory default MAC-Address set the “local-mac-address?” value to true.
root@solarisserver# eeprom local-mac-address?=true
This requires a reboot for the changes to take effect and hence reboot the server.
root@solarisserver# init 6
When the system comes back online, an “ifconfig -a” should show the NICs having individual MAC-Addresses. These are the factory default unique mac-addresses than the system-wide mac-addresses.
If however, if you find more than one interface still have same MAC-Address then it indicates that the NIC does not have a factory-default mac-address and hence will still use the system-wide mac-address.
Hello All,
Before reinstall Solaris 8, the E3500 server
worked with multiple NICs and mutiple MACs.
After reinstall Solaris 8, it still work with a
multiple NICs, but use a single MAC.
local-mac-address=true
Q. What alse can be the reason?
older Sun interfaces such as le, hme do not have a MAC address assigned to them. use the ifconfig command to change an interface MAC address.
ifconfig hme1 8:0:20:aa:aa:aa
to make the change perm put the command in a script that runs at boot or add it to /etc/init.d/inetsvc
of course make the MAC unique for each interface, only use on internal networks, and make a copy of inetsvc before you edit it.
Does my mac adresse change if I upgrade my computer with some other hardware? For example change the graphic card?