interesting experiment.

[Gregory Nowak]

I see. Never thought of all of that.
Greg


On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 05:59:58PM +0800, Kerry Hoath wrote:
> The MAC address is required to diagnose certain network related problems
> such as bad switches, faulty dhcp implementations from certain vendors,
> network jabbers, broadcast storms, packet tracing and a host
> of other uses.
> Watching your network for arp trafic with tcpdump can tell you if your
> windows box has come up onto the network and if the NIC is working.
> Knowing which machine you are looking for on a multi-pc network means knowing the mac address
> especially if there is an ip address conflict.
> Compound your problems by having a corrupted dhcp lease database under NT or 2 machines
> set to the same ip 1 dhcp 1 not, and you'd like to know which
> machine is where.
> MAC addresses are unique, and many organizations use the MAC address to track where
> their computers (or the network cards in said computers) are.
> Tracking a MAC address can tell you which segment on a switch a machine is on, and
> on complicated setups you can dump the MAC table to debug 802.1
> bridging problems.
> It is conceivable that on your home network you have personally
> never neded to know the MAC address of your windows box,
> and that is fare enough.
> I have debugged network problems in seconds with knowledge, a few MAC addresses
> and a packet sniffer that have baffled others for weeks.
> Maybe I am becoming disalusioned, but it seems so many people these days have
> no desire to know how things work, I mean really work.
> If you understand how things work,
> it is far easier to fix problems.
> My underlying knowledge of ethernet makes solving most networking problems a snap.
> 
> Regards, Kerry.
> On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 12:12:20AM -0500, Gregory Nowak wrote:
> > Ok, why would one need to know their nic's mac address under windows 9x?
> > I've never had to, and I used windblows extensively for a good while.
> > Greg
> > 
> > 
> > On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 12:49:52AM -0400, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > > On Sun, 19 May 2002, Octavian Rasnita wrote:
> > > 
> 
> -- 
> Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
> ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au
> 
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