Get ethernet MAC address without powering on machine?

Tue Jun 4 01:43:12 PDT 2002

On 4 Jun 2002, Jim Meyer wrote:

> This leads me to my question: anyone know of a clever way to get the MAC
> address from an ethernet device without needing to power the machine up,

No, unless the NIC has a boot ROM that tries to do bootp/DHCP.

Even IPMI requires initially configuring the machine.

Note that Wake-On-LAN is not part of the solution.  A NIC in WOL mode
will only scan received packets, and it usually does this at 10baseT to
reduce power usage generating link beat.

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
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