On 21 Aug 2000, David Oakes wrote:
> Chris Ralph said to Miami Mailing List:
>
> CR> Has anybody in Australia got the Optus Home Cable Modem Service
> CR> working with Miami?
>
> CR> They're talking about "MAC" authentification between my machine
> CR> and the cable modem - any idea what this is?
>
> The "MAC" address is the hardware address of your ethernet card. In
> Miami this is found on the Interface page, under SANA II parameters.
> This won't change unless you change ethernet cards, it is usually hard
> coded into the card.
The default address is normally stored in a ROM on the card, although it
can be overridden in the Miami(Dx) config. In most cases you shoudln't
change it, though. The concept is that MAC addresses are assigned in a
manner that makes them globally unique, which in turn insures that they're
unique on any particular LAN without having to configure anything.
Contrast that with assigning SCSI IDs. :-)
All cable/DSL modems need some way of insuring that multiple machines
don't try to use the same IP simultaneously. Often this is done by
cacheing the MAC address of the first machine to contact it (or the first
N, if you have multiple IPs). In this case, if you want to switch
computers (or have just replaced a NIC), you may need to reset or
power-cycle the modem to make it "forget". They *could* make the address
more diffcult to switch, but I suspect it's too much trouble for them.
On Mon, 28 Aug 2000, Keith Brown wrote:
> I recently ran one of those internet based firewall testers on both my Ami
> (Ariadne-II) and pee sea. My Ami running MiamiDX did not reveal it's MAC
> address, whereas the pee sea did. If they are requiring your MAC, you may
> have a problem. My DSL does not seem to require it. I'm curious because
> I was thinking of switching to cable.
The PC puts its MAC address *everywhere*, since that's the primary method
Microsoft uses to identify the machine and detect cases where the same
serial number of the software is installed on multiple computers. For
example, every Word document contains this information.
Fred Wright
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