Re: [Fwd:] Nvidia NICs with duplicate mac addresses
it was real. (I still ahve some 3c503's with the problem :) this is one reason why it is so important to be able to override the MAC. --bill On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 10:53:28AM -0400, Scott Berkman wrote:
This reminds me of a story I was told a while back that there was a batch of 3com NIC's that all went out with the same MAC from the factory. I never found out if that was a rumor/urban legend or the truth. Anyone know firsthand or have an article about that?
-Scott
-----Original Message----- From: Robert E. Seastrom [mailto:rs@seastrom.com] Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 10:33 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: [Fwd:] Nvidia NICs with duplicate mac addresses
Forwarded to NANOG in the interests of wider awareness... having been there and torn out my already scarce hair, duplicate MAC addresses can really mess up your day...
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Just when you thought this couldn't happen any more...
Copying from a different email list...
mac address 04:4b:80:80:80:03, was showing up in multiple places across the network. I googled the mac address and discovered that other people are having the same issue with this mac address. Below are some links describing the problem:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=22148 http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/archive/index.php/t-73469.html
I just wanted everyone to know about this problem in case you run across similar slow "connectivity" issues. I believe the network card is made by NVIDIA.
The Nvidia NIC on the Asus motherboard on my desktop computer spontaneously changed its MAC maybe a year ago from 00:13:d4:fe:04:ee to 00:0b:e0:f0:00:ed. It can still be overridden in software, but the default MAC address -- the one stored in "ROM" -- simply made a one-time, spontaneous, permanent change. Nvidia NICs ... as my mother said, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. So the rest is silence. Jim Shankland
On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:04 PM, Jim Shankland <nanog@shankland.org> wrote:
Nvidia NICs ... as my mother said, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. So the rest is silence.
Hi Jim, My mother wasn't quite so adamant, she just said "don't cuss", so I'll try to keep it clean as I relate my experiences with these "NICs of our affliction". As you're probably aware, Nvidia doesn't really have it together in terms of playing nicely with open source folks. The Linux driver is horribly reverse-engineered and the execution of the implementation is even worse - it couldn't figure out the card's actual MAC address so it assigned a random (and until recently often invalid, with an OUI from bogus space) address. This resulted in some interesting stuff in our switch logs. My recollection is that FreeBSD was no better. We had one batch that refused to pass traffic at 1000/full even when forced. Left me pining for nice reliable stuff like counterfeit Cisco hardware bought from a shady eBay store out of Hong Kong. But I digress. Eventually we voted with our feet; I gave strict instructions to our build guys to stop wasting our time with crummy NICs with no support, and insisted that they pay the small amount of extra money it takes to go with Intel. If you're looking for a funny "prank" to play on your tech staff, speccing a batch of these, sitting back, and watching the fun would get two thumbs up from me... but otherwise steer clear. Drive Slow, Paul Wall
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bmanning＠vacation.karoshi.com -
Jim Shankland -
Paul Wall