Unix on old-ish machines - advice sought

Scott> If you're too late (and these days you're almost certain to be Scott> too late with those old boxes,) you either 'make up' a MAC Scott> address after you solder the exterior battery onto the NVRAM Scott> module (there is a well documented procedure on this) or you Scott> 'own' a block of MAC addresses like I do (somebody had Scott> officially gotten a big block of MAC addresses for some Scott> embedded project and gave out extra blocks he didn't need. I Scott> have a block of 256 for my personal use). Scott> Or you can find some ancient 3Com NIC, say a 3c503 or the Scott> like, 'retire' it and and steal it's MAC address. Best Scott> practice, of course, is to know the original MAC address to Scott> replace. The officially approved procedure for making up MAC addresses is to take them from the "locally administered" range. Any MAC address with bit 1 set -- for example 02:00:00:00:00:00 -- is a locally administered address. By contrast, address blocks assigned by IEEE to companies ("OUI") have bit 2 clear. (There are a few old exceptions -- DEC got AA-00-01, 02, 03 before this definition was created, so those were grandfathered. Note, though, that the DECnet address prefix (AA-00-04-00) exactly fits the definition of "locally administered".) So if you have to make up an address, pick a locally administered one that you didn't already assign to another device on the same LAN, and it's guaranteed not to conflict with any company-assigned NIC address. paul