What is my Ethernet address?

[A. Lester Buck]

In article <432 at minya.UUCP>, jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
> The only correct answer is one that gives the Ethernet address that is
> on the card at this very instant, not one that "should" be there according
> to some file or server which should (but may not) be correct.  I'm trying 
> to determine whether those files and servers are correct; I can't very well 
> ask them whether they're lying to me.  (Well, maybe I can; what does the
> request packet look like? :-)

I hate to ruin your day, but there may not be any "one" Ethernet address on
the card at this very instant.  I have written an Ethernet driver, and the
adapter I wrote for had its manufacturer supplied unique address in a PROM,
but that was then loaded into a register on the Ethernet chip.  Nothing
prevents the software from putting any Ethernet address it wants into that
register.  I am not really familiar with the Sun, but I thought I read at
one time that Suns could load whatever Ethernet address they wanted from
/etc/ethers onto the adapter.  So whatever answer you get at this instant
may not be the hardware answer you really wanted.

-- 
A. Lester Buck     buck at siswat.lonestar.org  ...!texbell!moray!siswat!buck