MAC address assignment/rotation?

[Samuel Rydh]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2003 at 09:40:24AM -0400, Derrik Pates wrote:
> In playing around with Mac-on-Linux on a PowerMac 7500, trying to set it
> up in a bridged fashion using the tun driver, I've noticed that the MAC
> address that's used by the virtual network device is always the same.
> This will cause problems for simultaneous sessions (I'm trying to set
> this box up so that multiple users can start networked X sessions of
> MacOS on their Windows machines) to conflict, making networking break.

What exactly is the problem? It works over here. Note that you
should use multiple tun devices if you configure multiple
sessions.

>From the linux side, the kernel uses the mac-side IP (which
must be unique) and this address is translated into an
HW address and an interface. If no ARP entry exists, then an ARP
request is sent out on the appropriate tun interface.

>From the MacOS side, there is no problem either... 

External machines sees the MAC address of the linux machine
and never the faked tun MAC address.

The only problem I can see is if one wants to use an external
DHCP or bootp server. But the NAT stuff probably interferes
with this anyway. Running a DHCP/bootp server on the MOL
machine works though (the default MOL configuration does this).

> There should really be a config file option to set the virtual network
> device's MAC address to some arbitrary address, so that setups like what
> I'm trying to do are possible without serious hacking. I'll see what I
> can do in terms of hacking it in on my own, but... my 2 cents and all
> that.

It should work out-of-the-box...

/Samuel