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
