nanog mailing list archives

Re: [Fwd:] Nvidia NICs with duplicate mac addresses


From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs () seastrom com>
Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:19:44 -0400


"David W. Hankins" <David_Hankins () isc org> writes:

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 10:32:46AM -0400, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
Forwarded to NANOG in the interests of wider awareness...  having been
there and torn out my already scarce hair, duplicate MAC addresses can
really mess up your day...

Out of curiosity, does this happen often enough we might want to
consider an automated means to negotiate out of the problem state
(e.g. detect collisions and negotiate MAC address by DHCP)?

It would take years to deploy but might save thousands of hairs.

The same DHCP server (ip helper-address blah) serves my office, my
home, and the colo.  Can you give me an idea of a good heuristic for
telling the difference between moving my laptop around and finding MAC
address collisions?  Or are you suggesting that you hand out a MAC
address along with an IP address when the client DHCPs and the client
then changes it?

-r



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