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 > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at braille.uwo.ca > http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
