My MAC address is 00-00-00-00-00-00

[nsa.usa]

Hi,

It seems my MAC address is 00-00-00-00-00-00 !
How is this possible? And what can I do? Networking works fine and in
fact I'm writing this now on the computer with this NIC.

If I run 'tcpdump' on a linux box that acts as the gateway for this
computer, I can indeed see thha the MAC is 00-00-00-00-00-00. Check the
outputs below.
If anybody has any idea what's going on I'm *very* interrested. I find
it especially interresting that the linux-box (the gateway) is not
complaining at all about this! Thanks alot.

I'm running WindowsXP Pro (no servicepacks) on the system with this
funny NIC.
The network card is built-in to the motherboard so I can't check it in
anothe machine.

Here's the outputs:

******************************
ipconfig output:
******************************
Ethernet adapter LAN:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : SiS 900-Based PCI Fast
Ethernet Adap
ter
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-00-00-00-00-00
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.34
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.1
192.168.10.2


******************************
tcpdump output from the gateway (a linux box):
the gateway's MAC is 0:4:75:fe:64:a7 and this
dump is a ping-reply obviously.
******************************

22:47:07.884591 0:0:0:0:0:0 0:4:75:fe:64:a7 ip 74: 192.168.10.34 >
192.168.10.1: icmp: echo request
22:47:07.884631 0:4:75:fe:64:a7 0:0:0:0:0:0 ip 74: 192.168.10.1 >
192.168.10.34: icmp: echo reply

 

[Kurt]

Ran into the same thing on an office full of cheap computers with on-board
NICs. All (but one) had mac address 00-00-00-00-00-00. Very strange
networking problems!! As he computers were from a different vendor, we
didn't persue it. But to fix it we added PCI NICs to every computer and use
those instead of the built-ins

....kurt

 

[nsa.usa]

Interresting!
Did you notice if the built-in NICs were also SIS 900-Based (as
reported by ipconfig)?

Regards,
Tobias Skytte

 

[nsa.usa]

Actually I just solved this problem! If anybody is interrested it can
be fixed by installing a new driver from SIS (since my built-in NIC is
SIS-900 based). It can be found here: http://www.sis.com/download/

Regards,
Tobias Skytte