Two different suppliers - one was out of Wisconsin (I believe; it's been some time), and the other of Phoenix for the most recent batch. I have lots and lots of HP server gear - and never encountered such bizarre issue. On 1/1/11 9:59 PM, "Brielle Bruns" <bruns@2mbit.com> wrote:
On 1/1/11 8:33 PM, Graham Wooden wrote:
So here is the interesting part... Both servers are HP Proliant DL380 G4s, and both of their NIC1 and NIC2 MACs addresses are exactly the same. Not spoofd and the OS drivers are not mucking with them ... They¹re burned-in I triple checked them in their respective BIOS screen. I acquired these two machines at different times and both were from the grey market. The ³What the ...² is sitting fresh in my mind ... How can this be?
From the same grey market supplier?
I know HP has a disc they put out which updates all the firmware/bios in a specific server model, its not too far fetched that a vendor might have a modified version that also either purposely or accidentally changes the MAC address. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure where the MAC is stored - maybe an eeprom or a portion of the bios flash. Or, it could be botched flashing that blew away the portion of memory where that was stored and the system defaulted to a built in value.
Excellent example is, IIRC, the older sparc stuff, where the ethernet cards didn't have MAC addresses as part of the card, but were stored in non-volatile or battery backed memory. Memory goes poof, and you'll have problems. Some WRT54G/WAP54Gs suffer from the same problem when throwing third party firmware on there.