Changing MAC Addresses

Afternoon all,

I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this question as it is not necessarily directly related to Netfilter, but I can't think of anywhere else I might find anyone capable of answering it, so here goes.

I have a bunch of xboxes running linux which all have the same MAC address: 00:00:00:00:00:00. This causes obvious problems when more than 1 machine is on any one segment. I'm led to believe I can work around the problem by putting something like:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:50:f2:ab:cd:ef up

fairly early in the boot process (specifically, I've chosen the pre-up directive in /etc/network/interfaces as they're running Debian).

When I do this I'm able to see the MAC<->IP mapping in the ARP table of another machine, but it doesn't respond. I figure that something somewhere is remembering the old MAC address and dropping anything that doesn't match, although I don't know enough about low level networking in linux to be sure.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Sam

Sam,

What does /sbin/ifconfig -a tell you?

Andy