Anyone with A+ Certification can tell you that we ran out of MAC addresses years ago. The NIC companies never agreed on a way in the 80s and 90s to keep track of which addresses had been used by whom, so there’s been occasional crossover ever since. It’s not very common, though.
You say that, however both the card in the picture are made by the same company. The product codes, solder points on the pcb and the printed logo all give that away.
It’s pretty common here in Serbia. In my school they had 15 (yes fifteen) computers with same MAC. I somehow managed to convince the teacher that they can be changed via software. Usually some low-quality manufacturers from China make a whole series of motherboards with same MACs on integrated network cards.
We had two HP Proliants come in one with the same MAC attached to the NICs. Caused all sorts of trouble until we tracked the cause down. This was back in ’98.
Anyone who has been in networking more than 2 weeks knows that the “unique” MAC address allocations ran out years ago.
Usually, a manufacturer which duplicate MAC’s addresses does it in a cyclical way (I.E. run through them in sequence and then start again) so the chances of two addresses being the same during the working life of the NIC which used it first is minimal, or if they must duplicate owing to volume they make sure that the duplicate series goes to a different part of the world – but mistakes happen.
I work for a cable operator, and we had a thousand of our brand-new model of set top box delivered from the factory that all had the same MAC address. That was a rough week.
Yep, I saw this in Australia about 8 years ago.
A heap of ASUS mainboards in schools. Having all sorts of issues with PXE boot, Imaging and whatnot.
ASUS released some software that we would run on the machines to generate a new random MAC address.
Anyone with A+ Certification can tell you that we ran out of MAC addresses years ago. The NIC companies never agreed on a way in the 80s and 90s to keep track of which addresses had been used by whom, so there’s been occasional crossover ever since. It’s not very common, though.
You say that, however both the card in the picture are made by the same company. The product codes, solder points on the pcb and the printed logo all give that away.
It’s pretty common here in Serbia. In my school they had 15 (yes fifteen) computers with same MAC. I somehow managed to convince the teacher that they can be changed via software. Usually some low-quality manufacturers from China make a whole series of motherboards with same MACs on integrated network cards.
While these are MAC addresses I have two Verizon Aircards with the same MEIDs thats pissing me off right now.
We had two HP Proliants come in one with the same MAC attached to the NICs. Caused all sorts of trouble until we tracked the cause down. This was back in ’98.
Anyone who has been in networking more than 2 weeks knows that the “unique” MAC address allocations ran out years ago.
Usually, a manufacturer which duplicate MAC’s addresses does it in a cyclical way (I.E. run through them in sequence and then start again) so the chances of two addresses being the same during the working life of the NIC which used it first is minimal, or if they must duplicate owing to volume they make sure that the duplicate series goes to a different part of the world – but mistakes happen.
I work for a cable operator, and we had a thousand of our brand-new model of set top box delivered from the factory that all had the same MAC address. That was a rough week.
Yep, I saw this in Australia about 8 years ago.
A heap of ASUS mainboards in schools. Having all sorts of issues with PXE boot, Imaging and whatnot.
ASUS released some software that we would run on the machines to generate a new random MAC address.