nanog mailing list archives
Re: The tale of a single MAC
From: mikea <mikea () mikea ath cx>
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 16:26:54 -0600
On Sat, Jan 01, 2011 at 09:33:46PM -0600, Graham Wooden wrote:
Hi there, I encountered an interesting issue today and I found it so bizarre ? so I thought I would share it. I brought online a spare server to help offload some of the recent VMs that I have been deploying. Around the same time this new machine (we?ll call it Server-B) came online, another machine which has been online for about a year now stopped responding to our monitoring (and we?ll name this Server-A). I logged into the switch and saw that the machine that stopped responding was in the same VLAN as this newly deployed, and then quickly noticed that Server-A?s MAC address was now on Server-B?s switch port. ?What the ...? was my initial response. I went ahead and moved Server-B?s to another VLAN, updated the switchport, cleared the ARP, and Server-A came back to life. Happy new year to me. So ? here is the interesting part... Both servers are HP Proliant DL380 G4s, and both of their NIC1 and NIC2 MACs addresses are exactly the same. Not spoofd and the OS drivers are not mucking with them ... They?re burned-in ? I triple checked them in their respective BIOS screen. I acquired these two machines at different times and both were from the grey market. The ?What the ...? is sitting fresh in my mind ... How can this be? In the last 15 years of being in IT, I have never encountered a ?burned-in? duplicated MACs across two physically different machines. What are the odds, that HP would dup?d them and that both would eventually end up at my shop? Or maybe this type of thing isn?t big of deal... ?
We got a batch of NICS that had duplicate MACs in several pallets of IBM desktops, about 15 years back. We noticed this only when two of the machines were shipped to the same field office location. I've heard other state agencies talk about the same sort of problem with IBM and several other vendors. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO mikea () mikea ath cx Tired old sysadmin
Current thread:
- Re: The tale of a single MAC, (continued)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Randy McAnally (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Steven Bellovin (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Franck Martin (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Corey Quinn (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Marshall Eubanks (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Lynda (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Dobbins, Roland (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Mikael Abrahamsson (Jan 02)
- RE: The tale of a single MAC Daniel Dib (Jan 03)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Corey Quinn (Jan 02)
- Re: The tale of a single MAC Jethro R Binks (Jan 06)