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On 13/01/14 16:53, Grant Phillips-Sewell wrote: > My laptop (HP G6092ea) gets a new Ethernet MAC address every time it > reboots because the nVidia enforce chip reports the actual MAC address > incorrectly so the 'driver' doesn't know what to do with it and therefore > creates a new MAC address. It is very frustrating. Back in ye olde days, we used to set macchanger to run at boot out of /etc/init and randomly regenerate the MAC just to mess with each other, as it would break DHCP leasing, VLAN assignation, etc... I had no idea that these days it's apparently acceptable for real world hardware to do it normally. That's pretty shocking. Android and Windows smartphones and now a laptop all reported here as exhibiting reboot with a new random MAC. In big shops the MAC is normally used as an asset tracking number and fed into databases in large swathes so we can then use them for managing the workstations subsequently: remote installs, updates, DHCP and VLAN designations, the lot. A random MAC at every start would bring everything to a screeching halt at any one of those enterprises. Today I have learnt something new it seems. Apart from manually faking/changing it, I have never seen a hardware MAC address change otherwise in all my working years (except in weird cases like the PROM battery wearing out on certain early SGI/Sun systems and resetting the MAC to a default value). I would certainly regard anything showing that behaviour as faulty, and would return it though. Regards -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq